From Sky to Sky

by Amanda G. Stevens

  When all eighteen were broken, he threw the shelf aside and hoisted the bag. It hadn’t punctured. The shards jingled against each other as he walked back to the kitchen and doubled the bag.

  He opened the refrigerator and pitched everything in on top of the glass. Greek yogurt cups, a bag of now-slimy deli meat, Styrofoam containers of takeout Chinese, a cardboard box of stale pizza. He didn’t stop until the fridge and freezer were bare.

  David joined him in the pitching process. Clothes. Shoes. Bedding. All into black bags. Some of this could be donated, a thought born of stuffing backpacks last night. But no. These things belonged to a man rightfully dead, and they must cease to exist too.

  When Zac began chucking the paperbacks, David winced.

  “What, you want to sell them?”

  “No. Sorry,” David said. “Involuntary reaction.”

  “It’s not a bad idea. Mix-and-match sale on the serial killer’s library. Could bring quite a crowd.”

  “Including the Harbor Vale police.”

  As usual, humor was lost on David. Whatever.

  Less than three hours after they arrived, Zac was locking the door behind them, and nothing remained inside but the landlord’s furniture. The antique box of coin proofs was tucked under David’s arm. Foolish to throw those out, though Zac might have if David hadn’t been here.

  He gestured to the box. “A favor, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do whatever you want with that. I don’t want to see it again.”

  David gave him a measuring look.

  “I typed a letter,” Zac said as they walked to the car. “Management will get it in a day or so. I included a check to cover his breaking the lease. Couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere.”

  “Some tenants walk away without a word.”

  “Yeah.” Zac slid behind the wheel and started the car. “But I didn’t want them going after him to collect a debt. This seemed a cleaner way to finalize things.”

  “As long as he wasn’t behind on rent.”

  “He wouldn’t be.”

  “Were there neighbors to ask after him? Anyone?”

  Zac began to navigate the one-way streets back to the interstate. “He used to say he was a shadow among the mortals. He took pride in it, I think.”

  “I suppose it’s all the better for us now.”

  “Right? Considerate of him to plan ahead like that.”

  Again the exasperating look of scrutiny.

  Zac twisted his mouth into a smirk and shrugged one shoulder.

  “Zac …”

  Something about David’s tone made Zac want to leave him here to find his own way home. “Might as well say your piece.”

  David turned his eyes back to the passing landscape. “Tiana told me to hold my peace.”

  A laugh burst from Zac, but it was wrong, a mirthless bark. “Too late now. Go on.”

  “We’ve noticed a toll on you, in your face.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with this face. Ask the fangirls. Ask the modeling agencies I keep turning down.”

  “Tiana isn’t one to waste concern.”

  He searched for a comeback to that and couldn’t find one. He gestured at the city around them. “We did what needed doing. I never have to think about him again.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Some ghosts aren’t banished with action but with words.”

  “Words? Are you serious?”

  The steadiness of David’s gaze was nothing less.

  “Right. Words, of course, because the pen is mightier than the sword—oh, and the tongue is a rudder on a ship, almost forgot that one.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut against an image of Colm’s face, the widening of green eyes in the instant before Zac’s uppercut silenced his mockery. Another image followed it. The body. The blood. The grave. He pressed his fingers to his eyebrows.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If we find a way to bring eighteen murdered people back from the dead by talking, then we will talk.”

  “Very well.”

  A lot of things could be said for David. One of them was his respect for boundaries. Good thing, because the drive from Chicago to Harbor Vale, Michigan, was just under six hours. Would have been an expensive taxi ride.

  They drove for a silent half hour, and then David spoke as if there’d been no tension. “Tiana’s had an idea she wants to try. She calls it Blind Date with a Book. A display at the front of the store. If you’d care to help us wrap books in packing paper, we’d be glad for the extra hands.”

  Zac shook his head. Wrapping books. Quite the rogue he was becoming. The fans who tagged him online to ask for another shirtless photo shoot would be disappointed, but Crystal and Greg and their church cohorts would be all in. A smile tugged his mouth.

  “Sounds intense,” he said. “But I think I’m up for it.”

  David smiled. “I’ll let her know.”

  As they merged onto I-94, Zac nodded his satisfaction. He’d done what needed doing, and now it was finished. Maybe he’d even sleep tonight.

  “So in order to join my road trip, you left Tiana running the store for the day.”

  David shot a glance at him. “She’s capable.”

  “Sure, but does she get time-and-a-half when the boss no-shows?”

  “I no longer think of the store that way. Haven’t since … well, since we redefined things.”

  Neither did Tiana, based on Zac’s observation. She and David no longer behaved like manager and owner of the bookstore; now they were more like a single owner/manager unit. Either of them could tend to personal business without any hindrance to their bookselling, and both of them spoke of store decisions in terms of we and us. David’s reckless devotion to a mortal was baffling yet right. They suited one another down to the ground, as far as Zac could tell.

  David dug into the backpack he’d brought, which held more books than snacks. When he sat up, a new book in hand, Zac laughed.

  “How many books can you get through in a day?”

  “This is only the third, and we talked little on the way here.”

  “I guess we’ll also be talking little on the way back.”

  “If we’d flown instead, we’d already be home.”

  Zac’s shoulders tensed. He couldn’t have forced himself onto a plane. Not today, not this week or this month, not even first class where the ability to stretch his legs helped to calm him.

  “I like to drive,” he said.

  “If you change your mind, I’m still willing to spell you.”

  “Nah.”

  David opened his book.

  “I’d swear the author of that book is still alive,” Zac said, “but you are reading it, so I must be mistaken.”

  “I like him.”

  “It’s a Western.” And Zac had seen the mass-market edition on grocery-store endcaps.

  “Aye.”

  “Those are never accurate.”

  “Some more than others.”

  “Never shoot a man in the back? Solve our differences at high noon and ten paces? Oh, the loquacious stranger wears two guns, he must be an arrogant, overcompensating—”

  David’s laughter erupted.

  Zac couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “I’m right.”

  “You are.” David tapped his index finger against the book’s cover. “Yet I’ve returned to the genre for the last eighty years. The more mythological, the more I enjoy it.”

  “Blurry nostalgia.”

  David set the book on his knee and, to the degree that he could, stretched his legs under the dashboard. “Something like that.”

  Zac left him to the book for a time, until David remarked on the genius of John Ford and ignited a nonchalant debate on the greatest directors. At least they agreed to William Wyler’s place among the top three. When the topic waned, David returned to his book. Maybe he’d come along only to read, which was fine. Silence in company didn’t hold th
e weight and mass of silence alone.

  Traffic leaving the Chicagoland vicinity was no worse than it had been driving in, and Zac had driven this highway many times. So there was no excuse a few miles later when his brain began perceiving the cars around him as a shrinking box. No excuse for the cold sweat that broke out on his neck.

  A Mack truck loomed up beside him, filling the driver’s side window. The long silver hulk flowed past him as the left lane outpaced his, then cut over in front of him. Zac braked, and David’s head jerked forward.

  “Sorry.”

  “His fault, not yours. Although, in general, you drive with animosity for the human race.”

  “Do I?”

  “Traffic has been cowering from you all day, and Michigan drivers don’t cower.”

  Zac smiled, though the truck’s back end filled his windshield. “Happened after I moved to Denver. Those people will put the fear of death back into you.”

  He relaxed his hands on the wheel. He was all right again. Until a second semi inched alongside him. In front and to the left now, he could see nothing but silver metal.

  The sky was gone.

  THREE

  Traffic stopped. In the lane to Zac’s right, an SUV and a pickup truck formed a third side of the box around him. His rearview mirror showed him the bumper of yet another Mack truck, and his lungs began to seize. He hit the button for David’s window, because rolling down his own would only reinforce the proximity of the truck. Without looking up, David hit the button on his side.

  “Bit cold for open windows,” David said as the window slid back up.

  “I want it open.” Thank goodness he sounded casual.

  David looked up from his book. “What for?”

  “Autumn’s nice.”

  “When accompanied by the exhaust smell of a thousand sitting vehicles?”

  Zac hit the button again, and David’s window rolled down. “Doesn’t bother me.”

  David shrugged and went back to his book.

  Zac drew a breath of chilled outside air, and it eased his chest muscles. Proof this wasn’t physical: cold would exacerbate the problem if he were an asthmatic or something. No, this was all in his head. The air outside helped by virtue of being outside. He glanced sideways and, curse it all, David was watching him. Well, let him watch.

  “Hey,” David said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “Nope.”

  Zac gritted his teeth, grasped another breath but kept it silent. Nothing the matter. Once they got moving again, the control of driving would dispel the last of the stress.

  David’s cell began to ring like an old rotary. He picked it up from the side console and said, “Tiana.”

  Zac could have thanked her for her timing.

  “Hi,” David said. A pause. “On our way back. A few miles out from the city, at a standstill for now.” She said something else, and David lowered the phone from his ear and changed to speakerphone. “All right, you have both Zac and me now.”

  “Hi, Zac,” came Tiana’s voice.

  “Hey, Tiana.”

  “So, listen, something weird happened a few minutes ago, and I thought you both would want to know about it. This guy came into the store and asked to see David Galloway. Not ‘the store owner’—he asked for you by name, David. I told him you won’t be in today, and he said, ‘What about Zachary Wilson, do you know how I could get in touch with him?’”

  A reflexive glance between them, and David looked the way Zac felt—hackles up, ears attuned, despite being three hundred miles from the stranger.

  “What did you tell him?” David said.

  “Just that I didn’t have the information he was looking for. I figured I couldn’t pretend not to recognize Zac’s name, or not to know he’s been living in town.”

  Smart of her.

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “He got lunch at Mongolian Grill. I saw him leaving when I went into the diner.”

  The restaurants were across the street from each other. “Did he see you?” Zac asked.

  “Yeah, but he didn’t approach me. Just wandered off, looking like a first-time tourist, you know? Sort of aimless. I haven’t seen him since.”

  David’s brow furrowed, and he tilted his head at Zac. Questioning.

  “If he’d asked about only one of you,” Tiana said, “it wouldn’t have felt odd to me.”

  Zac grinned. “You get a lot of people asking about me?”

  David cocked an eyebrow at him, and Zac held in a chuckle. The guy was so easy to kid.

  “I think the grand total in the last month has been three,” Tiana said.

  Zac huffed loudly enough for her to hear, and she laughed. But some connection was nudging his brain. He flexed his hands on the wheel and popped his thumb joint a few times. “Tiana, what did this guy look like?”

  “Um … just normal. You want a physical description?”

  “Did he have black hair, dark eyes, maybe, um, five-foot-ten or so?”

  A slight pause. “Yeah.”

  David nodded, general alertness replaced by recognition. “Sharp cheekbones, white guy but not too pale, more of a tan complexion. Slight ridge on his nose, probably broken years ago. Voice inflection flatter than the average person’s.”

  “Whoa, yes. That’s him. Who is he?”

  “Well, his name is anyone’s guess, since he didn’t bother sharing it last month.”

  She drew a soft breath. “The guy who shot you?”

  “The very same.” A growl infused David’s words.

  “Why would he come back here?”

  “Don’t try to find out,” David said. “Stay clear of him.”

  “Well, obviously.”

  David raked a hand over his hair, standing it up in black spikes, and his chest filled with a harsh breath. “Ach, Tiana, be careful, please. The man’s unpredictable, and we don’t know what he wants.”

  “To threaten you again?”

  “I don’t know, love. But …” He shifted in the seat as if the space were too small now for him as well as Zac. Three hundred miles from the woman he loved, and though Tiana chided him—and Zac—for it often, there was no way to detach from the fact that she was susceptible. To death.

  “All right, listen, boys.” Tiana’s voice had softened. “I’m a grown woman and I’ll be careful. Don’t you dare start breaking traffic laws.”

  David chuckled. “Reading my mind again.”

  “I mean it, David. From what you’ve told me, he only risked a shot at you because he knew it wouldn’t kill you. That doesn’t mean he’d harm me.”

  David ducked his head and closed his eyes a long moment. Praying. Of course. Zac focused on the traffic, which had begun to trickle again, one car at a time, thawed rivulets in the great block of ice that was the Chicago highway. He swallowed a lump of gravel. God was nearby, no doubt, springing into action for the prayers of David Galloway. Must be nice. The thought drove a little hole through the center of Zac’s chest. He blinked hard.

  “If he comes into the store again, call me,” David said.

  “Okay. And hey, Zac?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah?”

  “I hope what you had to do today wasn’t too hurtful.”

  More like freeing, he hoped. “Thanks. It’s done now.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  She always assumed he was coming back to them. Well, he did keep doing it. “You will.”

  “And you, David.” Her voice took on a teasing lilt.

  “Aye,” he said. “See you soon.”

  Over the next six hours, the sun set in the rearview mirror and, once they passed the halfway point, the interstate traffic lessened. They discussed David’s book when he finished it; they discussed a dozen other things that didn’t matter. Mostly they dissected the possible motivations of the stranger with the antique revolver.

  Zac coasted the car down Main Street in Harbor Vale at twenty minute
s to eleven. Earlier than he had anticipated, but they’d spent less time at Colm’s apartment than he’d planned. At the next stop sign, Galloway’s Books stood on the northwest corner, one of the larger buildings in town, gray brick from ground to roof. The windows were dark, but an old K-car sat in the parking lot, half eclipsed by the store.

  “That’s not Tiana’s car,” Zac said.

  “No.” David sat forward. “It’s occupied.”

  They were sitting at the stop sign. No other cars on the street, but Zac got moving again. “You think it’s him? Watching for us?”

  “I’m guaranteed to show up there eventually.” David frowned. “Make another pass?”

  Zac drove down a dark neighborhood street and made three quarters of a square to set him back on Main Street. “I’m going to stop at the sign again, give you a chance to see.”

  He’d barely completed the stop this time when David said, “That’s him.”

  “Want me to pull in?”

  “Of course.”

  They were of the same mind, then. Might as well face the guy head-on if he planned to cause trouble. David motioned to Zac to keep the car running and together they got out, without discussion splitting up to approach the car from either side. The windows rolled down. David stopped at the driver side and Zac at the passenger side.

  The interior of the car was dark, and the man had parked away from the floodlight. Impressive that David had been so sure from the street, but being shot point-blank had likely seared the details into his brain. Now that he was nearer, Zac could identify the man as well. His shoulders tightened. Their fellow longevite wasn’t the only person inside.

  In the back seat lay a woman. A purple blanket was tucked around her, a fold of it fallen aside to reveal the seat belt awkwardly fastened at her waist.

  “You wanted us to leave you alone,” David said. “Which we’ve done, yet you return here.”

  Way to set an amicable tone.

  “For help,” the man said.