By the Sword

by F. Paul Wilson

  Hank looked worried. In fact his face had gone dead white. “How’d she look?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, I mean her health. Did she look well?”

  What was he getting at?

  “How so?”

  “I mean, did she look like she’d just had surgery or something?”

  “No. She was moving pretty good.”

  He looked relieved. “Okay. But where could she have gone?”

  “I’ve got the cab number, if that’s of any use.”

  Hank laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Darryl, my man, you’re invaluable!”

  Darryl felt a warm glow envelop him. Hank Thompson thought he was invaluable. How great was that?

  He shrugged. “Just trying to help the evolution.”

  “Well, you’re doing a great job.” He pulled a small notepad from one pocket and a ballpoint from another. “Here. Write it down. I’ll have Menck grease the driver’s palm with a few bucks and we’ll know where she came from.”

  Darryl wondered why that was so important and what Hank was worried about, and then it hit: the baby. Was he worried she’d gone out and had an abortion?

  Darryl was about to ask just that when he realized Hank was staring at him again.

  “It just occurred to me, Darryl—what are you doing here?”

  “Keeping watch.”

  “You had any sleep since your shift?”

  “No, I—”

  “You’re supposed to be resting up for your next shift.”

  “But—”

  Hank raised a hand. “I appreciate the heads-up you’ve just given us, but you’re gonna be no damn good on your own shift if you don’t get some shut-eye.”

  “But she got by these guys.”

  “She got by you too—on her way out. And she’ll get by you again if you’re not sharp.” His expression turned stern. “Now get off the street and get some rack time. We know what she looks like now, so she won’t give us the slip again. But if I see you around here during your off hours, I’m cutting you from the surveillance detail.”

  Darryl waved his hands. “Okay, okay. Just trying to help you out.”

  Hank gave him a thin smile. “We both know who you’re helping, but that’s okay. I’d be the same in your place. Now get out of here.”

  Darryl did just that. But he didn’t like it.

  11

  “May I see it now?”

  Jack looked down at the trembling fingers of Naka Slater’s outstretched hands…and hesitated.

  Again that strange urge to keep it for himself.

  Setting his jaw he pushed the rolled rug into Naka’s hands and felt a pang of loss tinged with relief to be rid of it.

  “All yours.”

  Naka took it and dropped into a crouch with the bundle across his thighs. His hands shook as he unrolled the rug. He gasped when he saw the sword.

  “It’s true! You have found it!” He caressed the hilt. “And I see someone has added a tsuka and a tsuba.” He looked up at Jack. “You?”

  Jack gathered he meant O’Day’s handiwork. He shook his head.

  “That was done by the previous owner. Now—”

  “Perfect!” Naka said, gripping the handle as he rose. He dragged the fingertips of his free hand across the filigree of holes. “It is just as they said it would be.”

  “They?”

  An alarm bell rang in Jack’s brain. Naka was acting like this was the first time he’d ever seen the katana.

  The guy didn’t answer. Instead, he gripped the handle with his second hand and swung the sword in a vicious arc.

  Jack was already backing away, already reaching for his replacement Glock. Now he leaped away, but the tip of the blade caught his left deltoid. He knew he’d been cut—felt the edge part skin and muscle—but felt no pain.

  When he looked up Naka was already into another swipe. Jack raised the Glock as he fell backward. No time to aim so he pointed the barrel in Naka’s general vicinity and pulled the trigger. The shot caught the bastard in his outer thigh.

  As Jack landed on his back he saw Naka spin and lurch away toward the street. He raised the pistol for another shot but decided against it. This was hardly an ideal shooting stance, and if he missed just as a car was passing…

  What was this? Try-to-kill-Jack-with-the-Gaijin-Katana Day?

  He rolled to his feet—and now he felt the pain. His left deltoid felt as if it had been sliced open. He looked. Yeah, it had. Only now he was feeling it.

  God damn, that hurt.

  And then from the street he heard a horn blare and tires screech, and a heavy thump—like a body against sheet metal.

  12

  Damnedest thing Darryl had ever seen.

  Tired as he was, he hadn’t been able to sleep. So he’d gone out wandering the city, hoping he’d eventually need to crash, but that hadn’t happened. Somehow he’d wound up in the West Eighties outside this bar he’d never heard of. Why this particular bar, he didn’t know. Almost as if he was on a string and the place had reeled him here.

  So there he was, checking it out as maybe a good place to grab a brew and trying to figure out those dead plants in the window. He was just reaching for the door when he heard this loud bang! Darryl had done some hunting in his day and knew a gunshot when he heard one. And he’d just heard one.

  And then this chinky guy comes stumble-running out of the alley next to the bar, crosses the sidewalk, and keeps on going between two parked cars right smack into the path of a delivery truck. The driver tried to stop, but he was clipping pretty good, so no way. Even if he’d been going slower—no way. The chink tried to stop but, again, no way.

  Ba-boom!

  As the chink went flying, his arms flapping at crazy angles, something flew out of his hand—long, metallic, propellering through the air. It landed point first with a shoonk! on the hood of a nearby Volvo wagon. No, not on the hood—through the hood and into the engine compartment.

  Darryl took a few steps to check it out.

  Be damned. A sword. And obviously a sharp one. What kind of blade can cut through a steel car hood like it was paper? One of those Jap swords like in the samurai movies, only this one—

  “Fuck me!”

  This one’s blade was all crudded up with little holes, just like the drawing Hank had shown him.

  …if anyone sees it, bring it to me…I want it.

  He glanced around. All eyes were on the scene of the accident, and the folks who weren’t just standing and gawking were rushing to help.

  Great.

  Just as he yanked it from the hood he saw a guy step out of the alley and check out the accident. He was holding his left shoulder and something dark was seeping between his fingers. Had he taken the bullet? And was he looking for the sword?

  Keeping a tight grip on the handle, Darryl did a quick turn, positioning the blade along the length of his body to shield it from the guy. Then he began quick-walking east toward the park, unbuttoning his outer shirt and pulling it around the sword. It didn’t hide it completely, but at least he didn’t look like some nutcase ready to start chopping up pedestrians.

  He’d duck into the park, wrap it in his shirt, then hightail it downtown to show the boss man what he’d found.

  What was going on with his luck? Maybe not luck. Almost seemed like something was guiding him.

  How cool was that?

  The high point of his life since his dissimilation had been the praise and backclaps he’d received from Hank for finding his precious Dawn Pickering. He’d thought it couldn’t get any better than that, but maybe the best was yet to come. He couldn’t wait to see the look on the boss man’s face when Darryl handed him this sword.

  Oh, yeah. Hank was gonna be tickled as all hell.

  13

  Jack washed down a couple of Vicodins with a Yuengling to ease the throb in his shoulder. It had taken Doc Hargus nearly an hour to sew the wound closed, inside and out. But he’d stopped the flow of blo
od and now Jack had to deal only with the seepage.

  Doc had given him some antibiotic tabs and a tetanus shot, leaving Jack covered against pretty much any complication. He’d told him to keep it in a sling. Jack had bought one on the way home but didn’t know how much he’d wear it. Gave him a trussed-up feeling.

  All through the repair, Hargus kept saying, “You sure this wasn’t done by a scalpel? I’ve only seen this clean a laceration from a scalpel.”

  He’d scoffed when Jack told him it had been made by a centuries-old, rotted-out sword. Doc thought every one of his patients embellished the stories behind their wounds. Even Jack. Hell, Jack might have scoffed too if he hadn’t been there.

  He shook his head. Two days of legwork, a lot of miles, a trio of corpses, and a customer on the way to the hospital.

  And what did he have to show for it? Half a fee and a neatly sliced shoulder.

  And no sword. The katana had disappeared. Like magic.

  Well, not like magic. Jack hadn’t been able to hunt for it, bleeding as he was. He’d sent Julio and a couple of the regulars out, but they’d all come up empty. The only possibility he could think of was some passerby picking it up and running.

  But why? It looked like junk.

  He shook his head again. The rule of the city: What’s not nailed down or protected is fair game—as good as mine.

  Well, good riddance. He’d been attacked twice with it today. He wasn’t angling for a three-peat.

  Thing was, why had Naka Slater attacked him? Jack understood O’Day’s motive, but what gave with Slater? To save the rest of the fee? That didn’t make sense, considering how he owned a plantation on Maui and how fast he’d come up with the first half.

  Or maybe it was a bridge-burning deal—sever his only connection to the katana. Jack couldn’t fathom why he’d think that necessary, but he’d never been comfortable with the way some people’s heads worked.

  He glanced over at his computer and realized he was overdue to check the Web site. Hadn’t logged on in a couple of days. His in box was probably clogged with spam.

  He entered his user name and password on the Web mail page and—yup—welcome to Spamopolis. After deleting the come-ons for Cialis and stock tips and home loans, then the appliance repair questions, he came to a subject line that read: Need to find lost object.

  “Just been there, just done that,” he muttered, moving the pointer toward the DELETE button. Then he thought, what the hell. See what’s lost before deleting.

  Dear Repairman Jack—

  I hope I have the right person. Someone gave me your name and said you might help. I have it on good authority that a very valuable object stolen from my home has been brought to New York. For various reasons, I’d rather not involve the police. If I have the right person, please call ASAP. I have only a few days before I must return to Hawaii.

  N.S.

  Jack stared dumbfounded at the screen.

  Stolen object brought to New York…no police…Hawaii.

  And the initials: N.S. Naka Slater?

  What the hell?

  He grabbed one of his TracFones and punched in the number. A male voice said, “Hello,” after the first ring.

  Jack asked his usual opening question about whether this someone had recently left a message at a certain Web site.

  “Yes, I did,” the voice said in perfect English. “Is this the man called Repairman Jack?”

  “Yeah. Is this Naka Slater?”

  Dead silence on the other end, then a nervous laugh. “Oh, I see. Your friend must have called to give you a heads-up.”

  “What friend would that be?”

  “I…I don’t know her name. She’s a friend of a friend.”

  “An artist friend?”

  “Yes. Then you know who I mean.”

  Jack hadn’t a clue, but he let it ride.

  “You need something found?”

  “Yes. Very much. A family heirloom that was stolen from my home. Can we meet soon?”

  Oh, yeah, Jack thought. We’ll meet soon. He rolled his shoulder and felt a jab of pain. Not tonight, but definitely tomorrow. No way was he going to miss this. Not for the world.

  He set up a meet for an early lunch at eleven and gave him directions to the Ear Inn.

  Yeah. The Ear. If déjà vu was going to be the order of the day, might as well push it to the limit.

  He hung up, leaned back, and said, “What the hell?”

  It was becoming a litany.

  FRIDAY

  1

  Jack started to turn the knob on the door to Gia’s third-floor studio and stopped. This felt wrong. Whatever waited on the other side belonged to Gia. If she didn’t want him to see them, then he should respect that. And he wanted to respect that. And it would have been easy to respect that, if only…

  …they’re not her…

  If only he hadn’t run into Junie. And if only she hadn’t told him about the paintings. And if only Gia hadn’t left him here alone while she went off to one of her final occupational therapy sessions.

  He twisted the knob a little farther. Should he?

  Oh, hell, why kid himself? Showing the paintings to Junie had ruptured their protective seal, so he was going to peek through that break.

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Indirect light from the skylights illuminated the room but he flipped the light switch anyway. Leaving the door open behind him, he looked around at the large canvases leaning against the walls. One canvas, its back to him, rested on an easel in the center of the room.

  He moved to his right and stopped at the nearest. So dark…black surrounding a circle of dark, dark blue with specks of white and a glowing moon. It took him a while to orient himself. The perspective seemed to be from the bottom of a well or some kind of hole in the Earth, looking up at a circle of night sky lit with cold, distant stars and a full moon.

  But not our moon.

  Same size, same color, but the familiar mares and ridges and pocks that made up the friendly Man in the Moon were gone, replaced by stark, foreign contours. For all he knew, the real moon might have turned its back and was showing its so-called dark side.

  He moved on to what appeared to be a desert at night, but the dunes formed strange angles, and the moon overhead—the same alien moon as in the first painting—shed much less light than it should have.

  Junie was right. These weren’t Gia. Or at least not like the chiaroscuro roofscapes she’d been painting before the accident.

  Next, a cityscape, but a ruined city, with that same moon overhead. He bent closer. He had a feeling that things were flying in that night sky, obscuring stars as they passed, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Then a succession of dark landscapes with strangely curving horizons and distant mountain ranges that seemed to reach into the stratosphere.

  He turned finally to the work in progress on the easel. He stared, trying to find structure, something to latch on to. It seemed to be a swirling blackness seeded with faint, blurry, yellow-gray blotches—like internal flashes of lightning within a black storm cloud.

  Jack stepped back. What had happened to her? He could find nothing welcoming in any of them. They looked…felt…dangerous. He was getting a Pickman’s-model vibe—could she have seen these places in her coma when her swollen brain was inching her through death’s door? She’d never mentioned seeing anything like what she’d put on canvas. She might have no conscious memories, but her unconscious couldn’t forget. Maybe it was trying to vomit them up.

  All because of me, he thought as he stepped back into the hall and closed the door behind him. All my fault.

  2

  Using a one-handed grip, Hank Thompson stood in the center of his room and swung the sword back and forth in a figure eight.

  Cool.

  It looked like crap, but he couldn’t help loving the feel of it, the balance. It almost seemed to move on its own. He’d never held a sword—wait, not a sword, this was called a katana. Had to remember tha
t. Much cooler sounding than “sword.”

  He stopped swinging and stared at it. Darryl had brought it to him last night, and bingo—for the first time this week, no dream of the Kicker Man and the katana.

  What was it with Darryl and always being in the right place at the right time? He’d seemed like such a nobody at first, but obviously he was tuned into something. Maybe the same something that was broadcasting to Hank’s internal antenna.

  Whatever was going on, it seemed obvious that this blade was important and somehow connected to the future of Kicker Evolution. Something wanted him to have it.

  What something? The something out there whose signals he was picking up? The “Others” on the outside that wanted to be on the inside? They must have wanted him to have this sword real bad because, if Darryl was to be believed, it literally dropped into his hands.

  Okay. So he had it. Now what?

  He didn’t know. Only time would tell, and he wasn’t about to waste a lot of time pondering it. He had other, more important matters on his mind. And Dawn Pickering topped the list.

  Menck had tracked down the cabbie and found out where she’d been picked up: an abortion clinic.

  Hank had almost lost it right there in front of Menck and the others. But he’d hung on to his cool and called the place. To his enormous relief he’d learned that you couldn’t just walk in and get an abortion—at least at this place. They required a few blood tests before they put you on the table and did the deed.

  So Hank now had two teams on the street—one watching the Milford, and the other out front of the clinic. One way or another, Dawn Pickering was not getting through that clinic door.

  He hefted the katana and started swinging his figure eight again. He was just getting into a rhythm when he heard a knock on his door. He ignored it. But when it came again, he reluctantly laid the katana on his bed and answered.