“Blood money.”
“True, but he’s targeting assholes who deserve it.”
‘Even your uncle?’ Fats signed.
Hackett shrugged. “Bob and I were never close and I’ve been having these nightmares, and,” Hackett paused, “it’s tough to describe.”
‘What about Gloria?’ Fats signed.
“My aunt? What does she have to do with this?”
Fats returned his hands to the keyboard. “Read.”
Hackett returned his gaze to the screen and saw that Fats had managed to capture part of a conversation between K.A.R.M.A. members that had taken place online. Hackett read the thread, realizing quickly that the one called FARMR was the young assassin he had spotted in Vancouver.
“Looks like trouble in paradise,” Hackett said, then his face paled as he read further down the thread.
“Oh, fuck,” he moaned. “They’re planning to take out my aunt.”
Fats nodded and signed: ‘That’s why I needed you to come over.’
“Sonofabitch!” Hackett jumped to his feet. “I’ve got to warn her. This asshole is fucking insane.”
Fats reached out and grabbed Hackett’s arm. “Need a plan,” he said. Then he let go and signed: ‘If they are using kids, they could strike from anywhere. Who will believe you?’
Hackett churned over the possibilities.
There was only one person who might listen.
Chapter 49
Hackett rang the doorbell and waited.
Like most of its neighbors, the plain two-story house was in need of new paint, a bundle or two of shingles for the roof, and a handful of screws to perk up its sagging rain gutters. The small front lawn was neat and freshly mowed, but the driveway beside it had broken down over the years, its surface discolored by oil stains from the mud brown four-door that had outlasted its affordable monthly payments by at least a decade.
But despite its tired exterior, this was the home that held Hackett’s fondest memories. When he needed an escape, or a word of advice, this is where he always turned, and where the door was always—
The door opened and Frank stared down through eyes that practically bled from equal parts pain, torment and booze.
“Can I come in, Uncle Frank?” Hackett asked. “We need to talk.”
Frank hesitated, as though fighting his own reluctance, before standing aside and offering a thin gap of admittance between soft belly and rigid doorframe.
Hackett squeezed through.
At the end of a carpeted hallway, Hackett’s cousin stood with a glass of milk in his hand. His hair was unkempt and he wore a pair of baggy sweatpants under an over-sized T-shirt that made him look like he was twelve. He lifted a hand to wave.
“Hey, Tom,” he said.
“Hey, Frankie. You OK?”
“He’s fine,” said Frank gruffly.
Frank stepped in front of Hackett, blocking the way to his favorite room of the house, the kitchen where his Aunt Carol loved to bake, and shooed Frankie away to bed. While Frankie retreated upstairs, his father opened the door to his private den and ushered Hackett inside.
Hackett entered the cozy den with dread. It was a comfortable room designed for a man who needed his own space. To think, his uncle would tell everyone. But, to drink, was the ultimate truth.
With heavy curtains to block out the light, the room was stuffy with old cigar smoke and the lingering odor of more than a few spilled malts. A wood-burning fireplace, guarded by a leather couch and two matching armchairs, rested against one wall. Instead of a television, the room’s only entertainment came from an old-fashioned woodgrain radio that never seemed to get clear reception.
Hackett had once tried to tell his uncle about the ability to access worldwide radio over the Internet, including stations in Ireland, but Frank had dismissed the idea outright. He wasn’t one for change.
Above the fireplace, Frank had hung a large portrait of the three siblings’ families together on the day Frankie was christened. Frank and Hackett’s father had worn their uniforms. Everyone looked happy.
A snapshot in time can make the lie a reality.
To the left of the fireplace, taking a place of prominence and impossible to miss, was the reason Hackett always felt anxious when he entered that room.
Frank had erected a shrine to Hackett’s dead father, the hero cop who sacrificed himself to save the lives of four officers, including Frank. Framed and yellowed newspaper clippings and dozens of photographs surrounded a large wooden plaque and gilded Medal of Valor with Detective Sergeant Calway Hackett’s name engraved upon it.
Frank closed the door and moved to stand behind Hackett.
“Your Da would still want you to have it,” he said. “That’s an important medal. The highest honor an officer can—”
Hackett shook his head as he had done a hundred times before. He moved to one of the armchairs.
“I need your help, Uncle Frank.”
FRANK BENT TO feed a few more blocks of dried red cedar to the fire. When the wood caught and its sweet smoke drifted to mask the older, more familiar odors, he turned to a small table positioned within easy reach of the empty armchair.
The table, battle-scarred and water-stained, contained everything he needed: an empty glass and a near-full bottle.
Frank poured. And with his drink glistening and refills close to hand, he finally relaxed his shoulders and sat down. The chair wheezed with an escape of air as it molded to his shape like a familiar lover.
“OK.” He lifted the drink to his lips. “What do you need?”
“K.A.R.M.A. has been in contact with me,” Hackett began. “They’ve been tipping me off. That’s how I was first on the scene to take photos of Hudson.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed. “They told you about Bob?”
“No. They didn’t contact me until after that photo ran. I think Bob was their first.”
“Their first?”
Hackett winced. “They’re targeting pedophiles.”
“What?”
“They killed Hudson because he raped and murdered children, and they killed Bob because he was abusing young boys.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Is it?”
“You know it is,” Frank seethed. “You spent time with—”
Hackett’s voice went cold. “Yes, I did.”
A flash of pain crossed Frank’s face as he swallowed his drink and quickly poured another.
“You talk to your Ma about this?”
Hackett shook his head. “She’s got enough on her plate. Besides she has a way of reinventing history once the coffin’s in the ground.” Hackett stared accusingly at his uncle. “Must be a family thing.”
“IS THAT WAY you came here?” asked Frank, his words beginning to slur. “To stir up more trouble.”
“No,” said Hackett. “I need your help, but I also need you to understand why this is happening.”
He told Frank about the threat Fats had uncovered against Bob’s widow.
Frank digested the news, washing it down with sips of amber anesthetic.
After a few moments, he asked, “And you’re positive they were talking about our Gloria?”
“Definitely.”
“But they’re just kids?”
“Dangerous kids. Killers.”
“I have a hard time envisioning a child doing the kind of ...,” he stumbled over the right word, “work ... that was done to Bob. The scene was a mess ... blood ... Christ, it was everywhere.”
Hackett leaned forward. “That’s what they’re counting on, Uncle Frank, but our killers are getting younger all the time. I looked it up. Until the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for juveniles in ’05, there were 72 kids sitting on death row for murder. When you were scanning the crowd in the park, it never crossed your mind to look for a kid. He could have been standing right in front of you, watching the whole time.”
A flashback of an acne-scarred youth flashed in Hackett’s mind. The memory
made him pause, the possibility intriguing.
“What?” said Frank, picking up on the vibe.
“Just this kid I talked to at the scene,” said Hackett dismissively. “I’d forgotten about it, but ...”
“But?” Frank pressed.
Hackett didn’t want Frank to become distracted, but he quickly explained about the untraceable email he had been receiving, how Cypher seemed to know about his conversation with the police, and how K.A.R.M.A. had knowledge of his relationships with Fats and Chandra.
“If K.A.R.M.A. has bugged my place,” Hackett said. “Stephen is someone who would have access to the right equipment, that’s all.”
“I’ll pass it on to the detectives.”
Frank reached for the bottle again, but Hackett jumped out of his seat to stop him.
“What about Gloria?” he hissed. “Can we get police help there? She’s in danger. We don’t know when they’ll attack, or where—”
“That’s trickier,” Frank snarled. His eyes bored into Hackett’s, as though assessing whether or not his nephew had the balls to actually stop him, before he grabbed the bottle and topped up his glass.
“I’ll talk to your aunt and maybe spend a few nights at her place just to be safe, but I don’t want this going outside the family.” Frank’s eyes darkened further. “I’d look like an ass if I went to the lieutenant with nothing but a fuckin’ chatroom conversation.”
Hackett blew air from between terse lips. “This is serious, Uncle Frank. I wouldn’t have come to you if I thought it was just kids mucking about. They’ve killed three people so far, and they’re not planning to stop.”
“I’ll deal with it,” Frank barked. “You just look after yourself.” Frank drained his glass and muttered quietly, “As usual.”
Chapter 50
Hackett stomped into Fat’s lair and collapsed onto an uncomfortable chair.
‘So what did Frank say?’ Fats signed.
“To leave it with him.”
‘But you don’t like that idea?’
Hackett snorted. “I don’t think he believed me.”
Fats shrugged. ‘Nobody wants to think kids are capable of this level of violence.’
“True,” Hackett agreed, “but you’ve seen my photos and so has he. These guys don’t fuck around. They go for the jugular, figuratively and literally. In New York, someone stabbed that guy 26 times. That’s a lot of rage being vented.”
Fats scratched his nose. ‘What are you going to do?’
“Frank says he’ll keep an eye on Gloria,” said Hackett. “But I think I should be around to keep an eye on him.”
Fats grinned. ‘I have something.’
Fats stood up and led the way to a long bench that ran the full-length of the back wall. Covering every square inch of its surface was a clutter of unorganized electronic parts and plumbing supplies as if an insane Geppetto had made an army of steam-powered robots lay down and commit Seppuku.
Fats excitedly swept away a nest of assorted screws and lifted up a brass, leather and multi-lensed contraption that would have made H.R. Giger giggle.
“What you think?” he asked in his monotone squeak.
Hackett didn’t know how to respond.
Chapter 51
Theresa was surprised when she received the urgent email that told her it was time to keep her part of the pledge.
The way Cypher had been acting in chat lately, she figured her original mission, along with everyone else’s, had been put on the back burner till further notice.
To get the email was a thrill, for she wanted to play her part, to be valuable, needed, maybe even loved, but it also sent a cold stab of panic deep into her stomach.
She had never killed before.
Not that fear was a stranger to her; Theresa had lived with it all her life. She even had nightmares of a time before real memory where she found herself as a baby, naked, soiled, curled in a sodden crib and shivering as dark hands reached down for her. She always awoke before she saw the face behind the hands, but she knew she never wanted them to touch her again.
Those nightmares made her wonder if babies had special senses that adults didn’t understand; if maybe they were born with an otherworld intelligence that is slowly sapped away as their innocence erodes. Whatever it was, Theresa knew that if anything special had ever existed inside her, it had been beaten, raped, cut, choked and stomped out a long time ago.
FEW PEOPLE PAID any attention to the skinny girl with long, limp hair the color of rain-soaked newspaper as she climbed back aboard the bus to Chicago and curled into the same seat near the back she had been occupying for hours.
Her clothes — flared blue jeans with holes in both knees, the ragged cuffs so wide they dragged on the ground like miniature wedding trains; dark blue T-shirt, too tight and too thin, a pink unicorn printed on the front so faded it practically disappeared; and a denim jacket that had barely survived a head-on collision with a bottle of bleach — seemed to match the dark fabric of the seats, making her feel that all she had to do to become invisible was close her eyes.
The one thought that cheered her as the bus rumbled closer to the city was that she was helping Needle. She breathed on the window and wrote his name in the condensation.
She wondered what he looked like.
How old he was.
The timbre of his laugh.
She only knew what she read on screen: his words, smileys and initialisms.
His real name, she knew, was Reddy. Cypher had let that slip too many times to be accidental.
He did it with all of them. It was just another way to show his power, to let them know that he alone possessed the secret of who each of them really was.
Typical male.
Needle seemed different though. He was sweet and funny, and he had traveled all the way to New York to kill that ... that bastard. Theresa shivered.
The things J-Cloth had done to her.
The things she had let him do ... just to escape into a cloud for a minute or two.
It crossed her mind that maybe she should try and hook up with Needle while she was in his city. Just to see what might—
“Hey gorgeous, whassup?”
Theresa closed off her thoughts and tilted her head skyward to see a young man leaning over her chair.
He was no more than twenty, his baby face blurred behind a thin dapple of wispy blond hair. He looked like he had just woken up, but his voice was so electrified that Theresa was surprised blue sparks didn’t fly from his ridiculously perfect teeth. She could tell from his eyes and the loll of his mouth that he was on his way down from a narcotic high — probably cocaine, still trendy after all these years.
He licked his lips. “I’ll give you five bucks for a suck.”
Theresa wondered if she had misdiagnosed. An after party hard-on was more common with Ecstasy than cocaine.
“What makes you think I’m for sale?”
The man looked puzzled. “Ain’t you?”
Theresa figured he was likely a college student on his way home from a weekend in the Big Apple. He would have blown all his money on liquor and drugs, trying desperately to pick up the beautiful girls who hung around trendy nightclubs, their amplified bosoms whispering encouragement from low-cut dresses, handbags never opening to pay for a drink. Eventually, he would find himself with only enough cash to get home, his balls bluer than a Montana sky.
Theresa had known hundreds of them. Angry, embarrassed colts who pulled her hair and squeezed her tits, their eyes rolling in their heads as they tried to imagine she was one of them: a beautiful thing with large, soft breasts and lips the color of Italian wine.
She heard him rustling behind her, digging in his pockets. Change rattled.
“Tell you what,” he said when he returned. “I got almost twelve bucks here. Howz about it?”
Theresa looked up again, her eyes discarding any hint of softness, then, slowly, she nodded.
The man’s voice turned deeper, less playful. �
��I’ll meet you in there.”
He lifted himself out of his chair and stumbled to the washroom at the rear of the bus. Theresa gave him a one-minute head start before following.
She no longer found it peculiar that even on a bus to a strange city, the men all knew she was a whore. And that, she thought sadly, was the real reason she couldn’t meet Needle. Because, then, he would know it, too.
Chapter 52
Hackett parked the Beast a block away from Gloria’s and wrapped himself in a full-length oilskin slicker. After adding fingerless gloves and a knitted watchman’s cap, the final touch was to dull the giveaway shine of his pale skin with a smear of burnt cork.
Trying not to think of how silly he would look if the neighbors spotted him, Hackett pulled on his backpack, slipped out of the Jeep, and stealthily made his way along the hedges to the rear fence of his aunt’s yard.
Unseen, he slipped into the yard through the back gate and made a dash for his cousins’ wooden playhouse that sat in the far corner. Once he squeezed through the tiny door, he found the playhouse to be reasonably warm and dry. Its main window also offered a perfect view of the entire rear of the main house.
Hackett quickly settled in. From his backpack, he produced a foam cushion, a stainless steel thermos of hot tea, a box of granola bars, and the strange headset that Fats had given him.
The steampunk-inspired contraption consisted of three lenses encased in brass housings and attached to the front of an old-fashioned leather wrestler’s helmet. Fats had also added a miniaturized earpiece, molded in a soft transparent plastic, and a tiny, needle-thin microphone. A rope of multi-colored wires led from the back of the helmet to a battery pack and cellular modem that remained in the backpack.
Once he was settled on his cushion, Hackett pulled on the helmet, adjusted the tension for a comfortable fit, fitted the earpiece and hit the power switch.
An electrical sensation tingled across his forehead, but it was more unsettling than uncomfortable.
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