“What? No, asshole,” she snapped, “I was in the bathroom to pee. I was gone for five minutes and you’re telling me this bullshit.”
“Please calm down,” he said, patting the air with both hands. “There’s no need to yell. Do you want to call your sponsor? Do you have a cell phone? If not, I can let you use mine and—”
If he said anything else, Yo-Yo did not hear it. She stood there and stared past him at the big industrial clock set high on the painted cinderblock wall. It was a simple design with numbers instead of Roman numerals. The red second hand ticked past the black hour and minute hands.
Against all logic, all sanity, all possibility it told her that the time was ten minutes after six.
An entire hour was gone.
Completely gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Monk caught up to Rain at the elevator.
“Hey, whoa, wait a goddamn second,” he called as the bell dinged and the doors slid open. Rain ignored him and stepped into the car. She tried to block him from entering, but Monk pushed his way in. Beyond him, as the doors closed, Rain could see the detective and the doctor standing in the hall frowning at them. The doctor’s face showed concern; the detective looked suspicious.
Monk stepped back from her as the car began to move.
“What was that all about?” he asked.
“I told you. I never saw that boy before. He’s not the one I saw yesterday.” Her words tumbled out faster than intended. “And I … I never saw a dead person before.”
“And you want me to accept that’s all it was?”
“Yes.”
“Did I mention that I think you’re a lousy liar?”
“I don’t give a shit what you think.”
Monk sighed. The doors opened on the first floor, and Rain got out, looked around, saw a ladies’ room, and made a beeline toward it. She pushed through the door to find a small two-stall room and no one around. Rain banged open the door to the closest stall, kicked the seat up, bent over, and vomited. It came out in a rush, bringing up everything she’d eaten and so much fear and horror. It was so much and so hard that it hurt her stomach and chest and throat, and it didn’t stop when her stomach was empty. She kept heaving and gagging.
He’s almost strong enough now, the voice inside her head whispered. He’s almost able to come all the way through.
Her stomach twisted again and again.
Then it was over.
She sagged backward against the stall door, gasping, pawing weakly at her mouth. Black flowers seemed to blossom in the air before her eyes, and her face was cold with oily sweat.
You have to do something, Mommy.
“God,” she whimpered as she crashed in slow motion against the closed stall door, collapsing down over the pain of that word.
Mommy. Dear God.
Mommy.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
There was a tentative knock on the door, and Monk called, “Hey, you okay in there?”
“I’m in the bathroom,” she snarled.
“Okay, okay.”
Rain left the stall and tottered over to the sink, washed her face, and used handfuls of water to rinse the sour taste of sickness from her mouth. Then she dug in her purse for gum, found none, but located an ancient container of Tic Tacs and poured six of them onto her tongue. She smoothed down her clothes, ran fingers through her short hair, appraised herself in the mirror. In that bad light, she looked older than her years. She looked like her mother. Same slim dancer’s build, same lines around her mouth and between her brows, same look of disappointment and disapproval. She turned away and went back out to the lobby where Monk waited.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said stiffly.
“If you say so. C’mon, I’ll drive you home.”
“No,” she insisted. “It’s okay. I can take a bus.”
“It’s pouring. If you don’t want to talk to me, then fine. But at least let me drive you.”
Thunder shook the building and rattled the heavy windows.
“Fine,” she said.
“Fine,” he said.
They ran for the car, and once they were inside, Monk turned the heat on high. He popped the glove box and removed a pack of tissues. Rain saw the butt of a heavy automatic pistol in there.
“I’m licensed to carry,” he said quickly. “There’s a trigger lock on it.”
“I don’t like guns.”
“I don’t either,” he said, and there was a deep bitterness in his voice that Rain did not ask about. He had his stuff; she had hers. They pulled out of the lot.
“What happened back there?” he asked after a few minutes.
Instead of answering, Rain asked her own question. “Why did you take a sample of blood from the carpet? You didn’t even mention it to Detective Martini or Doctor Silverman.”
“It wasn’t for them.”
“Then why?”
Monk drummed his fingers on the curve of the steering wheel for a few moments. “Remember you said that I wouldn’t believe what happened to you?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know that you’d believe me if I told you why I took the blood sample.” He paused. “It’s something I do. It’s how I find the sons of bitches who hurt kids like that one.”
“He committed suicide.”
“Maybe he did,” said Monk. “Or maybe there’s more to it than that.”
“But why the blood? What do you do with it?”
He gave her a completely humorless smile. “I’ll make you a deal, okay? You tell me what’s going on with you, and I’ll tell you about what’s going on with me. I’m willing to do that, but it’s got to be all the cards faceup on the table. Otherwise, no deal.”
Rain thought about it while they waited at a red light. She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Monk sighed. The light turned green, and he drove. “Then that’s where we are,” he said.
A couple of times on the drive back, Monk tried to start a conversation. Not about the boy. Idle chatter. Rain looked out the side-view window at the storm and gave one-word answers until he gave up. As they drove along her block, Rain saw Joplin go dashing across the street, a broken umbrella held ineffectually over his head. He vanished into his building.
Before she got out, Monk said, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with you, Rain, but whatever’s happening is bad. Believe me when I say that I can tell. You have my card. If you need help, call me. Day or night, it doesn’t matter. I don’t sleep a lot, so you can always reach me.”
She said nothing.
Monk sighed and nodded, and she got out and ran for her door, but when she turned to see if he was still watching her, his car was gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Joplin texted Rain as she was reaching for her front door.
U home? Come up?
She almost didn’t reply. Rain was frazzled, scared, confused, and even more convinced that she was losing her mind. Going to Joplin’s would mean passing that spot where the boy killed himself. Whoever that boy was.
She stood in the foyer and texted back:
Got to feed Bug.
His reply:
Feed her and then come over.
She typed:
Need to take a shower.
After a very slight pause, his reply came in.
I have a shower.
And then:
I have running water.
Happy to soap your back.
She didn’t reply.
Instead, she went home, took Bug out for a quick pee break, fed her; then Rain changed clothes, then walked to Joplin’s building, and slipped inside as quietly as a ghost. She climbed the stairs and lingered but for a moment on three, glancing at the ladder, the exposed pipes and the stained carpet.
You have to do something, Mommy.
“I’m sorry,” Rain said softly.
She thought she heard a sound behind the Japanese man’s door, but after
a moment of listening, there was nothing else. So she climbed the last set of stairs and knocked on Joplin’s door. He was smiling when he opened it. He looked at her, and an immediate expression of concern clouded his face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Rain shook her head. “I don’t want to talk.”
Joplin stepped aside to let her enter, then he closed and locked the door. There was music playing. Joplin preferred old stuff. French café music, old Dylan and early Tom Waits, mixed with opera and some of Chopin’s moodier pieces. An eclectic mix that put him in the right gear while he was painting. He reached for his iPad to change to a different playlist, but Rain touched his hand, and when he glanced up, she shook her head.
He took her in his arms and held her. He smelled of linseed oil and gesso and paint. But also of coffee and cinnamon and soap. Joplin put a finger under her chin and lightly raised her face, then he bent and kissed her very gently and very deeply.
She pushed his hand away, grabbed the hem of his black T-shirt, and pulled it over his head. He had a lean, wiry body without piercings or tattoos. All his artistic expression flowed from mind through arm into paintbrush and from there to canvas. Rain unsnapped and unzipped him, and he stepped out of jeans and underwear. He was already hard, and she took him between her palms, feeling his warmth and reality.
When he reached to undress her, she flinched, shook her head, and did it herself. There was a measure of control she needed to find, and she took her time removing each layer, then dropping them like autumn leaves around where they stood. He did not try to touch her until she took his hand and placed it flat between her breasts with his palm over her heart.
Then she took his hand and led Joplin into his own bathroom. He had a glass shower stall. No curtains. Nowhere for something to hide. When the water was the right temperature mix, they stepped in, slid the door shut, and did nothing but hold each other under the spray for a long, long time.
Then there was a longer time of tenderness. They touched each other as if it were for the very first time. Tentative fingers and hands and lips and tongues, discovering the curves and planes of each other. He came before she did, but that was okay. Rain wasn’t in a race for any kind of closure. She needed the warmth, the connection, the clean intensity of what they were doing.
Later, after they had dried each other off with big towels and walked naked to his bed, they began again. Joplin kissed his way down the length of her and then settled with his hot mouth on her, his hands caressing her hips and stomach and breasts. He knew better than to touch the ragged scar from her C-section. He’d made that mistake once before. Now he respected her boundaries and her needs. There was no urgency, but even so, she clutched handfuls of his hair and cried out as she came.
In the past, it had been one orgasm apiece and then rest. Not that afternoon. Before her heartbeat had even begun to settle, he rolled onto his back and pulled her atop of him, and they moved as one up a long, long hill, and when they plunged over the edge, they did it together.
INTERLUDE TEN
THE MONSTERS AND THE BOY
They learned together in the dark.
On the floor and all around his dirty little cot were dozens and dozens of windup pocket watches. Doctor Nine sat for thousands of patient hours teaching the boy how to build the clocks. From parts of old, dead clocks, and also from scratch. The Mulatto brought in lathes and grinders and milling tools, and the doctor taught the boy the art of clockmaking. It was the only part of their time together that the boy looked forward to. Making things. Fixing things. Cogs and pinwheels and quartz crystals and springs. He was instructed to lay them out with care. He was required to know and name each piece, and to explain every function.
One evening, the boy asked, “What’s so important about clocks?”
“Ah,” said the doctor, very pleased with the question. “Time is a scalpel. It cuts with great delicacy at every life. It slices away bits of everyone’s future. With each cut, there is less of a future.”
“So what?” asked the boy.
“That is a very good question, my boy,” said the doctor. “However, I will ask you a question first. What is hope? You know that word. Tell me what it means.”
The boy, wary of tricks and traps, was careful. Even at seven he was sly. “That’s when people think something good is going to happen.”
“Close,” said the doctor. “Hope is when they think something good might happen. They aren’t sure, but they hang so much of their lives on that slender little hook of chance.”
The boy said nothing, but he nodded because he wanted the doctor to think he understood. Real understanding, he had long ago learned, would come later, in the long, quiet hours when he was alone with his thoughts. Or when he watched the world on TV and tried to understand what being alive in the world outside meant.
“Time is a scalpel,” said Doctor Nine, “and hope is the whetstone that keeps it sharp.”
The nurse laughed at that. Doctor Nine smiled.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The only sign above the tattoo parlor’s door said INK, but everyone in the neighborhood knew it as Patty Cakes’s, after the woman who owned it.
A bell above the door tinkled as Monk pushed his way inside. Patty was there, a tiny switchblade of a woman with a retro purple Mohawk and lots of facial scars. She was half-Filipino and half-Chinese, who’d come to the States as a young woman, dragging a lot of personal baggage behind her, and had washed up there. She and Monk went way back, and it was her drill that had sunk the ink of half of his body art. The most photo-real of the faces were her work, and she was the only one apart from Monk who knew what those faces meant. And what they did to and for Monk. She cried sometimes when she was doing the art, and sometimes she screamed. Sometimes they both did. And a lot of times, they got drunk together and talked about places far away from there. Vietnam and Tibet, back alleys in Shanghai, and villages in Colombian jungles. Sometimes they talked about the Fire Zone, and sometimes they talked about Boundary Street. Sometimes they just got drunk together and clung to each other as the wheel of night turned. They weren’t lovers. Patty called it being “soul family,” and Monk could accept that.
She was doing cleanup on her tools and looked up to see what kind of expression he wore. She was intuitive and usually knew if they were going to have another bad night of ink and pain and blood.
Monk shook his head, though, and held up the small vial of fluid and debris he’d recovered from the carpet in the building where the unknown boy had died.
“That’s not blood,” she said as she held out her hand.
Monk gave it to her. He hooked a stool with a foot, pulled it over, and sat down next to the small fridge. “There’s blood in it.”
She shook her head. “Not much.”
“Then what is it?” asked Monk.
She held the vial up to study it against the light. “Beer me.”
He opened the fridge and took out a pair of Dagon beers from Myanmar. He popped the tops and handed one over. They tapped glass and drank. The beer was light, semisweet, and mildly hoppy. It was one of the few beers they could agree on. Patty Cakes liked IPAs that had real teeth, and Monk went the other direction toward hefeweizen. The beer was ice cold, and it went down smooth.
Patty removed the stopper on the vial and smelled it. “Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Not pee, either. That’s what I thought it was going to be. Blood and pee.”
“I know. So what is it, then?”
She replaced the stopper and set the vial down on her worktable. “I don’t know. If it was straight blood, I could tell you something. I get a tremble off of this, but that’s all.”
They drank.
“Is Morty still in town?” asked Monk.
Morty Albertson was a biochemist who worked at an independent testing facility that had contracts with police departments throughout New York and northern New Jersey. He was an ink junkie and had full sleeves dr
illed by Patty.
“Yeah. He’s been in here a couple of times. Trying to get me to do some art that I don’t want to do. Something stupid.”
“Stupid like what?”
“Two skeletons boning each other. His words. He wants it on his back, between his shoulder blades.”
“Why?” asked Monk.
“Because he’s trying to bang a Goth chick who works in his lab and he thinks that’ll impress her.”
“Is she fourteen and emotionally stunted?”
“No.”
“Then it won’t impress her.”
Patty took a swig. “Which is what I’ve been telling him.” She looked at the vial. “How fast a turnaround do you want on this?”
“Today.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Sure,” said Monk, “which means he won’t be bothered if he goes into the lab.”
“On his day off?”
“Tell him if he does, you’ll do the skeletons.”
“I don’t want to do the skeletons,” said Patty.
“This is for a good cause,” said Monk.
Patty frowned. “What cause? Was the kid who hung himself the one you’re looking for?”
“I don’t think so. Didn’t really match the photo. I’m going to call Doc Silverman in a bit to see if she’ll email me the fingerprint ten-card to see if she can put a name on the victim.”
“If it’s not your case, then why the rush on this stuff?” She tapped the vial with a bright blue fingernail.
Monk took a moment with that. “I met this woman,” he said and told her about Rain Thomas. Patty listened without comment to the whole story.
“Is she a new client?” asked Patty when Monk was finished.
“No.”
Patty cocked an eyebrow. “Someone you’re interested in?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Not in that way, no. She’s damaged goods.”
“Isn’t that your favorite flavor? You and all your broken birds.”
“Knock it off,” he said mildly. “This is different. There’s something about her. She tried to fake me out by saying she was a crime blogger, but that was bullshit. Then she tried to play concerned citizen, and she couldn’t sell that, either. Anna-Maria Martini didn’t buy her shuck any more than I did. No, this Rain has some kind of personal stake with the dead kid. You should have seen her face when she looked at the kid on the slab. But here’s the part that really caught me—at first she didn’t seem to recognize the kid at all, and then she put on her glasses and did this weird thing where she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Which was odd because the lens on that side was cracked. It was as if she was trying to see him through the crack.”