She stepped into the hall and walked slowly up to the spot where the boy must have died. There was one eight-foot section of ceiling that had been torn down, but only three feet of pipes were visible. What had Joplin said? The boy had hung himself with a knotted-up shower curtain? Why not rope or a belt? Why a shower curtain?
You know why, whispered the nasty voice of her parasite.
Rain tried not to imagine that the item the boy had used had been one familiar to her, that it had swirling colors she saw every day. That, too, was impossible because her curtain was still hanging in her bathroom, held up with fresh strips of duct tape. She’d seen it before she left home. Still there. Still there, so it couldn’t have been here.
The ladder was positioned to the left of the door to apartment 3F. The door was closed, and a small silver Tibetan knot was nailed to the frame. Rain had seen it before, and Joplin said that the old Japanese guy who lived there lived like a hermit and seldom went out. He was the kind of guy who jumped at shadows and never spoke to anyone except to apologize, and he apologized for everything from being on the stairs at the same time to making eye contact. A frightened, sad little man who put a talisman against evil on his door and replaced it with a new one four times each year, on the two equinoxes and the two solstices. The current one hung askew, and Rain wondered if the boy had kicked it.
Probably. She wondered if the man who lived here was the same Japanese man she had seen putting up handbills around the neighborhood. Probably, though that didn’t give her any insight into him.
A sliver of light escaped from beneath his door, and Rain saw a shadow of someone’s feet. The peephole darkened for a moment, and she realized that the old Japanese guy was standing on the other side of the door watching her.
“It’s okay,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. The shadow vanished, and she immediately felt bad for scaring him.
On the doorframe and along the wall closer to the ladder were scuff marks by the dozen. Rain closed her eyes to shut out the image, but behind her eyelids there was a high-def video crafted by her parasite that showed small sneakered feet kicking at the wall, trying to find purchase on the cheap chest-high wainscoting, of toes and heels hammering as panic overrode whatever hurt or damage had brought the kid up here. Signs of the cold lizard brain fighting against the less practical monkey mind to survive all the way to the edge of the big black. The wallpaper was torn, the crown molding on the wainscoting cracked, rubber and dirt smashed onto the surface of everything.
She stood still and tried to figure out how to react to this. It had been more than whim that had brought her up here, she could feel that much, but sensing that did not bring with it an explanation for why she was here. None of this made sense, and Rain desperately wanted to ask someone for advice. Or feedback. Or something. Yo-Yo had been outside with her, but there was so much risk in telling her. And Sticks …
Sticks. What was he, after all? Not a stranger. Not really. He’d dreamed of the Fire Zone, too. That meant they were connected somehow. He’d saved her yesterday after she’d gotten lost. That had to mean something, didn’t it?
“Yes,” she murmured, and she regretted how things had ended between them. His number was still programmed into her cell. All it would take was to press a callback button. She touched the side of her purse, felt for the shape of her phone. Found it. Took it out. However, she did not call. Instead, she opened the camera and took more than three dozen photos of the hall, the pipes, the ladder, the wall, the floor. Everything. Doing that helped. It made her feel strong, even if only a little. It was her doing something. What did it matter if she didn’t yet know why she took those photos or what she could possibly do with them? It was the right thing to do. Of that she had no doubt.
Rain put the phone back into her purse and turned.
A man stood in the shadows behind her. Tall, thin, pale, dressed all in black. Smiling at her from the darkness.
Rain screamed.
INTERLUDE EIGHT
THE MONSTERS AND THE BOY
They fought together in the dark.
The boy was used to pain. It was his oldest friend. Pain was nothing to him. Not physical pain, anyway. He wore his scars because they were what he had to wear. He ate the pain because it was the most frequent meal on which he could dine. He let it fill him and burn inside of him.
He even began to like the pain.
Some of the pain.
He liked the pain he got when he fought the monsters. The punches, the kicks. Even the whip. That was okay. Nothing the monsters could do to him would be worse than they had already done. After years of listening to them, of being taught by them, of sitting sometimes for days with only a flickering TV for company and news stories of horrors and wars and disaffection and hatred for entertainment, he knew that he had reached a limit. He had been taken as far out onto the edge as it was possible to go. There was only one thing they could still do to him and that was kill him.
But if they did that, then the game would be over.
And he would win.
That was a big moment for him, the realization that he did not need to escape his lifelong prison in order to beat them. He didn’t need to find a way to the world he’d seen on the TV to be free. All he had to do to completely, thoroughly, and deliciously defeat the monster was to die.
That’s why he fought them.
It was on those nights, after he had lost another fight, that the boy began dreaming about the Fire Zone.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Shhhh,” said the figure, holding a finger to his lips.
Rain stumbled backward, her hand fishing for the knife, but it wasn’t there. It was home, snugged into its place, and as useless to her as if it were at the bottom of the ocean.
Run! Screamed all her inner voices as the figure took a step toward her, moving from dense shadow into the piss-yellow glow of the first droplight. He was no longer smiling.
But it was not Doctor Nine.
This man was heavier in the arms and shoulders, a few inches shorter, with brutal eyes, a crooked nose, and lips that were bisected by a diagonal white scar. He wore a black leather jacket over an Everlast sweatshirt, dark jeans, and a pair of scruffy black Payless sneakers. From the edges of his cuffs and above the V of the sweatshirt, Rain could see tattoos. Not the gang or prison tats she’d seen on the Cyke-Lones in her dreams or the gangbangers in the neighborhood. No, these were different. They were faces. Small, pale, black and white but highly detailed. Photo-real. Grim faces filled with pain. Dark eyes watched her from the faces on his arms and throat, and with a sudden flash of intuition, Rain knew that he was covered with dozens—scores—of faces. Everywhere except his hands and his own face. Ghostly human masks that were strangely alive, living on his skin as if they could look out from their prison of flesh and ink and see the world.
“What do you want?” she snapped, hating the fear and helplessness she heard in her own voice.
The man looked at her with dark eyes that didn’t seem to want to blink. “I could ask you the same thing.”
And then she realized that she’d seen this man before. She fished for it and the memory came. Last night, at the Diner. This man had been sitting at the counter.
“Why do you want to know?” she said, putting as much challenge into her voice as she could squeeze past the choking fear.
“Do you live here?”
“What’s it to you?” she asked with more defiance than she felt. Why hadn’t she brought the damn knife?
“You don’t live here,” he said in a soft whiskey-rasp growl of a voice. He looked to be in his thirties; his eyes were a lot older than the face.
“How would you know where I live?”
The man put his hands in his jacket pockets, probably to show that he wasn’t a threat, Rain figured, and walked past her. She turned and gave ground in order to keep distance, then watched as he went and stood by the ladder and looked up at the pipes as she had done a few moments ago.
“Saw you come out of your building and walk down here,” he said.
“You were watching me?” she gasped.
“I was watching the street,” he said. “Sitting in my car finishing my coffee. Saw you and your boyfriend. Saw him leave.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said.
“Whatever. Saw you standing there for like twenty minutes with your eyes closed. You high or something?”
“How about ‘fuck you’?”
“Fair enough,” he said and gave her a small grin.
The thought that she had been standing like a zombie for twenty minutes scared the hell out of her. She moved a bit closer to the stairs, needing to flee, but curiosity made her ask, “Why were you watching the street?”
“Wanted to see who came in and out of here.”
“Why? You some kind of cop?”
“No,” he said, “I’m a licensed investigator.”
“Oh, yeah? Prove it.”
He dug his wallet out of a back pocket, removed a business card, and extended it between two fingers. She hesitated so long that he stepped over to the sheets of drywall and tucked it upright between two of them. Then he retreated a few steps, crossed his arms, and leaned against the opposite wall. When she still didn’t reach for it, he said, “The card won’t bite and neither will I.”
“People say that…,” she began and let the rest hang.
“Look, sister, it don’t mean shit to me if you believe me or not. We’re both trespassing here. The difference is I’m on the clock and you’re not.”
Rain kept well away from him and edged over to take the card. It was a cheap one, and it didn’t say much. She could read it easily without her glasses. A name, G. Addison; a phone number and email address. Below the name was a single word: Investigations.
“What’s the G stand for?”
“Gerald,” he said, “but everyone calls me Monk.”
Rain turned the card over, but there was nothing else on it. “Aren’t you supposed to have an actual license?”
“I’ve got one, but why should I show it to you?”
She had no answer to that, so she said, “I’ve seen you around.”
“I know,” Monk agreed. “At the Diner. You were there last night with some people.”
“Did you follow me? Is that what this is about?”
He grinned. “You need to get over yourself, sweetheart. Not everything’s about you.” Monk cut a look at the pipes. “Unless it is. Want to tell me why you came up here? Why’d you take all those pictures? I mean, I’m here on a gig, but you’re—what? A tourist? A crime-scene junkie?”
She fumbled for something to say and grabbed an answer completely out of left field. “I blog about crimes in Brooklyn. It’s, um, part of a community awareness project I’m doing for my MFA.”
Monk studied her for three full seconds. “Bullshit.”
“How would you know?”
“Because you’re a terrible liar,” he said. “And you’re way too scared to be someone who creeps around crime scenes. At best, you’re a first-timer; but my guess is that you’re a civilian and this is all brand new. So let’s circle back to why you’re so scared.”
“Well … you showed up out of nowhere. What do you expect?” Rain snapped.
He shrugged. “Look, let’s understand something, okay? I mostly do skip-trace work, which is running down bail skips and—”
“I know what a skip trace is,” she said irritably.
“Okay. Well, I kind of creep up on people all the time. Pretty sure that I’ve seen every possible reaction of surprise, alarm, upset, horror, shock, and fear there is. I guess I’ve become a connoisseur of that sort of stuff. When you saw me, you were afraid I was someone else, and that fried you pretty hard; but when I stepped out of the shadows and let you see me, your expression shifted. You went from being afraid of a particular someone to a woman being afraid of being alone with a big, male stranger. I understand that second reaction. Women should be alert and cautious, because there are a lot of asshole men out there who have skewed the math in favor of fear being the most natural reaction for chance encounters. It totally blows, and I know I’m a little creepier than most. I look like rough trade, and I am. I look dangerous, and I am. I look like I could hurt someone, and I can. I have. And if I tell you that you are totally safe around me, there’s no reason at all you should take me at my word. You’re scared but you’re not stupid, and I can see in your face that you’ve had some shit happen to you. Maybe a lot, maybe only a little, but enough to make you suspicious, defensive, hostile, and dubious. All of that is fair, and no guy—not even the Dalai freaking Lama—has any right to tell you that you’re overreacting or being unfair and prejudiced. As long as we have dicks, more muscle mass, and are still on the evolutionary bell curve where we’re closer to cavemen than elevated beings, your fear is 100 percent justified.”
Rain did not know how to respond to all of that, so she said nothing.
Monk smiled, and there was a sadness in his eyes she hadn’t noticed before. “So,” he said, “when I tell you that I can read your facial and body language and know that you were afraid I was someone else, I’d risk my next month’s rent that I’m right.”
Rain cleared her throat. “Did, um, someone hire you to find out what happened here?”
Monk’s smile faded. “I’m looking for a kid from this neighborhood who ran away two years ago. Runaway. Left a note. He’d be about thirteen now. He was always troubled. Bad dreams, night terrors. In and out of whatever therapy his mom could afford. Kid started cutting himself and drawing pictures all over his wall with his own blood.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. No one was sure if it was a chemical imbalance, birth defect, bad wiring, or life just fucked him up. The woman thinks her ex might have done stuff to him while she was out working.”
“Did you ask him? Her ex, I mean.”
There was a flicker of something very dark and nasty in Monk’s eyes. “We had a conversation,” he said. “He convinced me that he didn’t know where the kid was. This is one of those cases I keep coming back to, but there’s been no trace at all. A shrink friend of mine said that his runaway note could just as easily be a suicide note.”
“What did the note say?”
“‘I lost all my time. The hands fell off my clock.’ He used to draw clock faces on his walls. They never had hands on them. So, yeah, you can read a lot into that. None of it good.” Monk must have seen something in her expression, because he frowned. “That mean something to you?”
She thought about the voice of the little boy who’d spoken in her mind. They want to steal your time. “It’s nothing,” she lied. “Look, Mr. Monk, I—”
“Just Monk,” he corrected.
“Okay, Monk, I came up here because I saw a boy a few times yesterday and he seemed to be in trouble. I thought maybe it was him who’d … you know…”
“Yeah. Was it?”
“I don’t know. I got here last night when they were taking his body out, and he was covered up. I never saw his face.”
Monk nodded, reached into an inner pocket, and produced a four-by-six color photo of a nice-looking boy with brown hair and dark eyes. Unsmiling eyes and a mouth held in a rigid line. “This him?”
“No … I don’t think so. Same hair color and all, but…” She glanced at Monk. “You said he’d be thirteen now?”
“Just turned.”
“The kid I saw was maybe ten.”
“Could you be wrong? Boy I’m looking for was small for his age.”
“I only saw him for a moment a couple of times.”
Monk sighed and ran his hand thoughtfully over his face. “My next stop after this was to go and look at the body in the coroner’s office. Don’t suppose you want to come with me? See if it’s either of the kids we’re looking for.”
It was a repulsive, terrifying thought, and it sickened her.
She said, “Yes.”
There was
a creak, and the door to the old Japanese man’s room opened a quarter of an inch, enough for them to see a sliver of a frightened brown eye.
“Go away.” It was said very quickly, urgently, in a quavering voice.
“It’s okay,” said Rain quickly.
“Please,” begged the old man. “Go away before…”
“Before what?” asked Monk.
The man flinched. “Gomen’nasai,” he yelped, and the door closed.
They heard the lock click, then there was the distinct sound of a deep, broken sob. Rain and Monk looked at the door for a moment and then at each other.
“What did he say?” asked Rain.
“It’s Japanese,” said Monk. “He said he was sorry.”
“For what?”
Monk shook his head and turned away. He took a small glass vial from his pocket and knelt by the wet stains on the carpet. Rain had seen a million vials just like it; dealers used them for crack. It jolted her. But if Monk noticed her reaction, he showed no sign. He removed the plastic stopper, took a pocketknife from his pocket, flicked the blade into place, and then used the tip of the knife to scrape something off the carpet into the vial. He pressed the vial deep into the nap until some of the fluid oozed into it.
“What are you doing?” asked Rain. “God, is that the kid’s blood?”
Monk replaced the stopper, stood, and held the vial up to study it in the bad light. The contents were yellowish red, and tiny flecks of debris floated in it. “I thought it was, but if so, it’s mixed with something else. Piss, maybe, though the smell’s wrong.”
“Why the hell do you want that?” she asked, appalled.
He tucked the vial into a pocket and didn’t answer her question. “Let’s go,” he said.
Monk headed downstairs, and after a moment, Rain followed. It was pouring when they came out of the building