Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (28 page)

“But what’s his
name
?”

“He uses many. He has many identities, many different looks, but he never uses his True Name.”

“Do you know it?”

Anya nodded. “But I will not tell you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because he would hear you. And you do not want to attract his attention.”

“Says who?” Jack said, feeling the heat of the rage he’d been carrying around for months now. “I’ve got a score to settle with him and—”

“No!” Anya was leaning forward in her seat, eyes ablaze. “You stay away from him! Whatever you do, you must not antagonize him. He will snuff you out like a match if it suits him.”

“We’ll see about that. Just tell me his name and let me worry about the rest.”

Anya shook her head. “Speaking his name would lead him here—and he’s looking for me.”

“You? Why?”

“To kill me.”

Her words shocked Jack. And the matter-of-fact way she said it, as if she’d been dealing with this threat for so long she’d grown used to it, made it all the more believable.

But could it be true? If so, he’d lay off pressing her for Roma’s real name.

“Because you oppose the Otherness?”

“More than that. I stand in its way—in
his
way.”

Jack wanted to say, You’re a little old lady…how can you stand in anyone’s way? But he hadn’t forgotten how that alligator had been unable to enter her yard. Perhaps she and the others were keeping out the Otherness just as she’d kept out the gator, but on a far greater scale.

This little old lady was a lot more than she seemed. She had power…but from where?

Jack wasn’t going to waste his time asking. She’d already made it damn clear there were things about her and her friends she didn’t want known.

“You stand in his way to…what?”

“To opening the gates to the Otherness. The Adversary will remain in a state of becoming until he succeeds. If he does, he will be transformed and life, reality, existence as we know it will end. He thought he’d found a shortcut earlier this year. You were there and—”

“How do you
know
this stuff? Or was one of your ladies watching?”

“You might say that.”

Jack remembered gazing down into a bottomless hole…into an abyss glowing with strange lights…a steadily enlarging hole that he feared might devour him and the rest of the world.

Anya said, “The Adversary failed then because he acted prematurely. That shows me he’s anxious to finish his becoming. Since then he and those he has manipulated have doubled and redoubled their efforts to open those gates. But to achieve final success he must kill me or hurt me so severely that I can no longer oppose them.”

Apprehension tightened his shoulders. If the Adversary or the One or Roma or whatever the hell he was called was as dangerous as Anya said, she could be in big trouble. Jack hadn’t known her long, but he’d taken a real liking to this old broad.

“But if he doesn’t know where you are, he can’t hurt you, right?”

She shook her head. “No. He can hurt me. He hurts me all the time.”

“But how—?”

Anya stiffened and grimaced with pain as she sucked air through her teeth with a hiss. She arched her back and reached around to touch her right shoulder blade. Oyv jumped up and started barking.

“See?” she gasped. “Even now he does it! He’s hurting me again!”

Jack was up and around the chair, looking at her back.

“What? What’s happening?”

“Oh!” She was taking quick, shallow, panting breaths. “He stabs me! It hurts!”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. It will pass.”

Jack thought he saw a small spot of red—blood red—appear on the back of her kimono, but couldn’t be sure because it was within the hull of one of the bright red sampans.

“Are you bleeding?”

She leaned back against the chair, hiding her back from view.

“I’ll be all right.”

Her color was better and her breathing, though not normal yet, was easing in the right direction.

“Should I get a doctor?”

She shook her head. “No doctor can help with this. I’ll be fine. This isn’t the first time he’s hurt me, and it won’t be the last. He’s moving closer and closer to his goal. A strange season is upon us, and it will grow stranger.”

“Damn it, Anya, tell me his name. I’ll put an end to this.”

She shook her head. “No, Jack. He’s immune to your methods. He’s more than you can handle.”

“Then how do we stop him?”

Anya looked up at him and Jack saw fear in her eyes. “I don’t know. We can only hope that he makes a fatal mistake—he’s not perfect you know—or that the Ally steps in on our side. Otherwise, I don’t know if he
can
be stopped.”

16

After Anya’s pain had subsided, she shooed Jack out of the house. He felt he should stay but he could see that she wanted to be alone.

He stood in her front yard among the ornaments, staring at the rising moon, and wondering at how his life had changed since a year ago last summer when he’d accepted the seemingly simple, straightforward job of finding a stolen necklace. Now it seemed that every time he turned around, a new revelation leaped at him, tearing a jagged rent in the fabric of the snug, familiar worldview he’d been wrapped in for the first thirty-five years of his life.

A year ago he’d have written Anya off as a loon. But no more.

He popped into his father’s house and peeked again into his bedroom. The old guy was still sleeping peacefully with the TV going. Jack found the screwdriver and flashlight he’d used last night, then stepped outside and headed for the clinic.

Although he’d broken in once before, he didn’t take for granted that it would be as easy the second time. He was just as careful about approaching the building, keeping to the bushes and watching for the security patrols. About halfway there he realized he’d forgotten the mosquito repellent. They’d declared his arms and neck an all-night deli and were ordering take out.

Slapping and scratching, he picked up his pace and made it to the clinic faster than last night. He popped the window latch again and slid inside. After reclosing the window, he killed a couple of mosquitoes that were still drilling into his skin, then got to work.

Straight to the record room where he began flipping through the charts. He had the list of names his father had given him and though it was a long shot that they’d all had recent physicals, he had to check.

He started at the top of the alphabet and worked his way down, pulling the charts as he came across them:
Adele Borger…Joseph Leo…Edward Neusner…

All here.

No second guessing the ethics of invading privacy this time. These folks weren’t his father, and they were dead.

Inside the charts, Jack knew where to look. He went to the bottom of the final page of the complete physical. Each one read the same:
Final assess: excellent health.

A prickling sensation ran along the back of his neck. Seemed like being single at Gateways South and passing your free physical with flying colors was not a good thing. In their cases, it appeared to be a death sentence.

The pattern was obvious: The healthiest single members of Gateways South were dying by mishap. An early demise meant that, instead of having to wait many years for these healthy folk to go, the management was able to resell their homes immediately.

Jack had a pretty good idea as to the
why
and the
who
, and a wild idea as to the
how
.

He wondered if the doc was in on it. Probably not. He seemed like too much of a straight shooter.

Besides, you didn’t need the doc to get a look at the files. Jack’s presence here proved that. But there was an even easier way. If you were someone with an official position at Gateways South, and if you had a key to the clinic, you could stroll in here at night, check out the names of those who’d had a complete physical lately, and peruse their files to your heart’s content.

Jack decided that he and Gateways South director Ramsey Weldon were going to have a little heart-to-heart chat tomorrow.

Friday

1

Jack jogged along the asphalt walking/bicycle path that wound through the pines lining the eastern limits of Gateways South. A thin morning mist wound between the trunks; brown needles, shedding early due to the drought, littered the path. The scent of pine lay thick in the air.

He’d awakened to silence for a change. Carl must have been trimming someone else’s hedges this morning. His father was just starting to stir, so Jack had come out for a run. He’d been too sedentary the past few days. Needed to get the blood flowing. He’d thought about checking on Anya but it was too early. He’d swing by on the way back.

He chugged along in a Boneless T-shirt and gym shorts, building a sweat; he wore his leather belt under the loose shirt to hold the small-of the-back holster for his Glock 19; the way it bounced against the base of his spine as he ran was annoying, but no way he was going unarmed around this place.

An eight-foot chain-link fence ran along the Gateways border to his right. The links of the par-3 golf course lay to his left. He noticed a lone, vaguely familiar figure hunched over a putter on a rise ahead. As he neared he recognized him: Carl.

Jack veered to his left and found Carl on a putting green, working with a club that protruded from his right sleeve. Jack had thought he was a righty, but he was using a lefty stance.

He waited until Carl had hit the ball—he just missed, rimming the cup—before speaking.

“When did you join the community?”

Carl jumped and spun. “Oh, it’s you! You scared me again! You gotta learn to make more noise when you come up on people.”

“Sorry,” Jack said. “I’ll work on it. Say, did your video camera catch any signs of Ms. Mundy watering her lawn?”

“Zilch again.” He grinned. “And I hope it don’t. Wouldn’t mind keepin’ this up the rest of the year, long as old Doc Dengrove keeps payin’ me.”

Jack glanced down at the balls Carl had arranged on the grass before him, sitting in a line, waiting for the putter. “Is a golfing membership one of the perks of your job?”

He shook his head. “Only on weekdays, and only on my day off, and only if I stay out of everbody’s way. I ain’t much with the drivers—I mean, my scores for eighteen holes are pretty pan-o-ramic—but I like to putt. I ain’t a bad miniature golf player.”

“No kidding.” This was fascinating, simply fascinating. Jack waved and turned away. “Got to keep moving. Good luck. Sink those putts. Make those birdies.”

But he never got restarted. The sight of a beat-up red pickup cruising the dirt road on the far side of the fence stopped him cold. It slowed as a pair of mismatched eyes peered at him from under the brim of a dirty John Deere cap, then picked up speed again.

A thought struck Jack. He turned back to Carl, intending to ask him if he knew them, but the half-sick look on his face as he watched the pickup bounce away into the trees said it all.

“You know those guys, don’t you.”

Carl swallowed. His left eye was already looking away; the right followed. “Why you say something like that?”

“Because I think you do. Who are they?”

“Nobody to mess with. You don’t want to know ’em.”

“Yeah, I do.” Especially after what his father had told him last night about the accident. Jack gave him a hard stare. “Who are they, Carl?”

Carl looked like he was going to try to float some bullshit, then his shoulders sagged and he shook his head.

“They live out in the Glades. On a lagoon in one of the hardwood hummocks.”

“I thought no one was supposed to live out there except maybe some local Indians.”

“Well, I think you know that what’s upposed to be and what is ain’t necessarily the same thing.”

Yeah. Jack knew that.

“You know where this lagoon is?”

Carl nodded. “I guess so.”

“How do I get there?”

“You don’t, not unless you know the way.”

“Can you show me on a map?”

Another shake of his head. “It ain’t marked on no maps. It’s pretty well hid.”

“Then how come you know where it is?”

Carl looked away. “I was born there.”

This didn’t surprise Jack. He’d seen what the folks connected to the red pickup looked like, and figured there had to be something wicked strange about Carl’s right arm. Add that to what Anya had said about the mutating effects of the Otherness leak at the nexus point in the Glades, and the connection looked obvious.

He remembered other misshapen people he’d met earlier in the year…Melanie Ehler and Frayne Canfield…both had attributed their deformities to “a burst of Otherness” during their gestations. Carl’s story was most likely the same.