The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  Jack had been in and out of gold since, and was buying it now. He figured the numismatic market was depressed, so he was investing in choice rare coins, too. They might not go up for many years, but he was buying for the long run. For his retirement—if he lived that long.

  “I think I have something you’ll really like,” Monte was saying. “One of the finest Barber Halves I’ve seen.”

  “What year?”

  “1902.”

  There followed the obligatory haggling over the quality of the strike, bag marks, and the like. When Jack left the store he had the Barber Half and a 1909 proof 63 Barber Quarter carefully wrapped and tucked in his left front pocket with a cylinder of Krugerrands. A hundred or so in cash was in the other front pocket. He was far more relaxed heading back uptown than he had been coming down.

  Now he could turn his mind to Gia. He wondered if she’d have Vicky with her. Most likely. He didn’t want to arrive empty-handed. He stopped at a card shop and found what he was looking for: a pile of furry little spheres, somewhat smaller than golf balls, each with two slender antennae, flat little feet, and big rolling eyes. “Wuppets.” Vicky loved Wuppets almost as much as she loved oranges. He loved the look on her face when she reached into a pocket and found a present.

  He picked out an orange Wuppet and headed for home.

  7

  Lunch was a can of Lite beer and a cylinder of Country Style Pringles in the cool of his apartment. He knew he should be up on the roof doing his daily exercises, but he also knew what the temperature would be like up there.

  Later, he promised himself. Jack loathed his exercise routine and embraced any excuse to postpone it. He never missed a day, but never passed up an opportunity to put it off.

  While nursing a second Lite, he went to the closet next to the bathroom to stash his two new acquisitions. It was a cedar closet, the air within heavy with the odor of the wood. He pulled a piece of molding loose from the base of a side wall, then slipped free one of the cedar planks above it. Behind the plank lay the bathroom water pipes, each wrapped in insulation. And taped to the insulation like ornaments on a Christmas tree were dozens of rare coins. Jack found empty spots for the latest.

  He tapped the board and molding back into place, then stepped back to survey the work. A good hidey hole. More accessible than a safe deposit box. Better than a wall safe. With burglars using metal detectors these days, they could find a safe in minutes and either crack it or carry it off. But a metal detector here would only confirm that there were pipes behind the bathroom wall.

  The only thing Jack had to worry about was fire.

  He realized a psychiatrist would have a field day with him, labeling him a paranoid of one sort or another. But Jack had worked out a better explanation: When you lived in a city with one of the highest robbery rates in the world and you worked in a field that tended to get people violently angry with you, and you had no FDIC to protect your savings, extreme caution as a daily routine was not a symptom of mental illness; it was necessary for survival.

  He was polishing off the second beer when the phone rang. Gia again? He listened to the Pinocchio Enterprises intro, then heard his father’s voice begin to leave a message. He picked up and cut in.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Don’t you ever turn that thing off, Jack?”

  “The answerphone? I just got in. What’s up?”

  “Just wanted to remind you about Sunday.”

  Sunday? What the hell was—”You mean about the tennis match? How could I forget?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Jack winced. “I told you, Dad. I got tied up with something and couldn’t get away.”

  “Well, I hope it won’t happen again.” Dad’s tone said he couldn’t imagine what could be so important in the appliance repair business that could tie up a man for a whole day. “I’ve got us down for the father-and-son match.”

  “I’ll be there bright and early Sunday morning.”

  “Good. See you then.”

  ’’Looking forward to it.”

  What a lie, he thought as he hung up. He dreaded seeing his father, even for something so simple as a father-and-son tennis match. Yet he kept on accepting invitations to go back to New Jersey and bask in parental disapproval. It wasn’t masochism that kept him coming back, it was duty. And love —a love that had lain unexpressed for years. After all, it wasn’t Dad’s fault that he thought of his son as a lazy do-nothing who had squandered an education and was in the process of squandering a life. Dad didn’t know what his son really did.

  Jack reset the answerphone and changed into a pair of lightweight tan slacks. He wouldn’t feel right wearing Levis on Sutton Square.

  He decided to walk. He took Columbus Avenue down to the circle. People were lined up outside the Coliseum there waiting to get into a hot rod show. He walked along Central Park South past the St. Moritz and under the ornate iron awning over the Plaza’s parkside entrance, amusing himself by counting Arabs and watching the rich tourists stroll in and out of the status hotels. He continued due east along Fifty-ninth toward the stratospheric rent district.

  He was working up a sweat but barely noticed. The prospect of seeing Gia again made him almost giddy.

  Images, pieces of the past, flashed through his brain as he walked. Gia’s big smile, her eyes, the way her whole face crinkled up when she laughed, the sound of her voice, the feel of her skin… all denied him for the past two months.

  He remembered his first feelings for her… so different. With almost all the other women in his life the most significant part of the relationship for both parties had been in bed. It was different with Gia. He wanted to know her. He had only thought about the others when there was nothing better to think about. Gia, on the other hand, had a nasty habit of popping into his thoughts at the most inopportune times. He had wanted to cook with her, eat with her, play tennis with her, see movies with her, listen to music with her. Be with her. He had found himself wanting to get in his car and drive past her apartment house just to make sure it was still there. He hated to talk on the phone but found himself calling her at the slightest excuse. He was hooked and he loved it.

  For nearly a year it had been a treat to wake up every morning knowing he was probably going to see her at some time during the day. So good…

  Other images crept unbidden to the front. Her face when she found out the truth about him, the hurt, and something worse—fear. The knowledge that Gia could even for an instant think that he would ever harm her, or even allow harm to come to her, was the deepest hurt of all. Nothing he had said or tried to say had worked to change her mind.

  Now he had another chance. He wasn’t going to blow it.

  8

  “He’s late, isn’t he, Mom?”

  Gia DiLauro kept both hands on her daughter’s shoulders as they stood at the window in the front parlor and watched the street. Vicky was fairly trembling with excitement.

  “Not quite. Almost, but not quite.”

  “I hope he doesn’t forget.”

  “He won’t. I’m sure he won’t.” Although I wish he would.

  Two months since she had walked out on Jack. She was adjusting. Sometimes she could go through a whole day without thinking about him. She had picked up where she had left off. There was even someone new creeping into her life.

  Why couldn’t the past ever stay out of sight where it belonged? Take her ex-husband, for instance. After their divorce she had wanted to cut all ties with the Westphalen family, even going so far as to change her name back to the one she had been born with. But Richard’s aunts had made that impossible. They adored Vicky and used every imaginable pretext to lure Gia and her daughter over to Sutton Square. Gia had resisted at first, but their genuine affection for Vicky, their insistent pleas, and the fact that they had no illusions about their nephew—”a bounder and a cad!” as Nellie was wont to describe him after her third glass of sherry—finally changed her mind. Number Eight Sutton Square had
become a second home of sorts. The aunts had even gone so far as to have a swing set and a wooden playhouse installed in the tiny backyard just for Vicky.

  So when Nellie had called in a panic after Grace had been discovered missing on Tuesday morning, Gia had come right over. And had been here ever since.

  Grace Westphalen. Such a sweet old lady. Gia couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to harm her, and no ransom demand had been made. So where was she? Gia was frightened and mystified by the disappearance and she ached for Nellie, whom she knew was suffering terribly behind her stoical front. It had only been out of love for Nellie and her deep concern for Grace that she had agreed to call Jack this morning. Not that Jack would be much help. From what she had learned of him, she could safely say that this was not his sort of job. But Nellie was desperate and it was the least Gia could do to ease her mind.

  Gia told herself she was standing here at the window to keep Vicky company—the poor child had been watching for an hour already—yet there was an undeniable sense of anticipation rising inside her. It wasn’t love. It couldn’t be love.

  What was it, then?

  Probably just a residue of feeling, like a smear on a window that hadn’t been properly wiped after spring cleaning. What else could she expect? It had only been two months since the break-up and her feelings for Jack until then had been intense, as if compensating for all that had been missing from her aborted marriage. Jack is the one, she had told herself. The forever one. She didn’t want to think about that awful afternoon. She had held the memory off all day, but now, with Jack due any minute, it all rushed back at her…

  SHE WAS CLEANING his apartment. A friendly gesture. He refused to hire a cleaning lady and usually did it himself. But to Gia’s mind, Jack’s household methods left much to be desired, so she decided to surprise him by giving the place a thorough going-over. She wanted to do something for him. He was always doing little things for her, yet he was so self-contained that she found it difficult to reciprocate. So she “borrowed” an extra key to his apartment and sneaked in after lunch one day when she knew he was out.

  She knew Jack as a gentle eccentric who worked at odd intervals and odd hours as a security consultant—whatever that was—and lived in a three-room apartment stuffed with such an odd assortment of junk and hideous old furniture that she had attacks of vertigo the first few times she visited him. He was crazy about movies—old movies, new movies, good movies, awful movies. He was the only man she had ever known who did not have a Master or Visa card, and had such an aversion to signing his name that he didn’t even have a checking account. He paid cash for everything.

  The cleaning chores went smoothly until she found the loose panel at the rear of the base of the old oak secretary. She had been polishing the secretary with lemon oil to bring up the grain and make the wood glow. Jack loved oak and she was learning to love it, too—it had such character. The panel swung out as she was storing away some of his latest “neat stuff”—an original red and green Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine shake-up mug and an official Tom Corbett Space Cadet badge.

  Something gleamed in the darkness behind the panel. Curious, she reached in and touched cool, oiled metal. She pulled the object out and started in surprise at its weight and malignant blue color. A pistol.

  Well, lots of people in the city had guns. For protection. Nothing unusual about that.

  She glanced back into the opening. There were other gleaming things within. She began to pull them out. She fought the sick feeling that intensified in the pit of her stomach as each gun was delivered from the hiding place, telling herself that Jack was probably just a collector. After all, no two of the dozen or so guns were alike. But what about the rest of the contents: the boxes of bullets, the daggers, brass knuckles and other deadly-looking things she had never seen before? Among the weapons were three passports, an equal number of driver’s licenses, and sundry other forms of identification, all with different names.

  Her insides knotted as she sat and stared at the collection. She tried to tell herself they were things he needed for his work as a security consultant, but deep inside she knew that much of what lay before her was illegal. Even if he had permits for all the guns, there was no way the passports and licenses could be legal.

  Gia was still sitting there when he came back in from one of his mysterious errands. A guilty look ran over his face when he saw what she had found.

  “Who are you?” she said, leaning away as he knelt beside her.

  “I’m Jack. You know me.”

  “Do I? I’m not even sure your name’s Jack anymore.” She could feel the terror growing within her. Her voice rose an octave. “Who are you and what do you do with all this?”

  He gave her some garbled story about being a repairman of sorts who “fixes things.” For a fee he found stolen property or helped people get even when the police and the courts and all the various proper channels for redress have failed them.

  “But all these guns and knives and things… they’re for hurting people!”

  He nodded. “Sometimes it comes down to that.”

  She had visions of him shooting someone, stabbing him, clubbing him to death. If someone else had told her this about the man she loved, she would have laughed and walked away. But the weapons lay in front of her. And Jack was telling her himself!

  “Then you’re nothing but a hired thug!”

  He reddened. “I work on my own terms—exclusively. And I don’t do anything to anybody that they haven’t already done to someone else. I was going to tell you when I thought—”

  “But you hurt people!”

  “Sometimes.”

  This was becoming a nightmare! “What kind of thing is that to spend your life doing?”

  “It’s what I do. More than that, it’s what I am.”

  “Do you enjoy it when you hurt people?”

  He looked away. And that was answer enough. It was like one of his knives thrust into her heart.

  “Are the police after you?”

  “No,” he said with a certain amount of pride. “They don’t even know I exist. Neither does the State of New York nor the IRS nor the entire U.S. government.”

  Gia rose to her feet and hugged herself. She suddenly felt cold. She didn’t want to ask this question, but she had to. “What about killing? Have you ever killed someone?”

  “Gia…” He rose and stepped toward her, but she backed away.

  “Answer me, Jack! Have you ever killed someone?”

  “It’s happened. But that doesn’t mean I make my living at it.”

  She thought she was going to be sick. The man she loved was a murderer! “But you’ve killed!” “Only when there was no other way. Only when I had to.”

  “You mean, only when they were going to kill you? Kill or be killed?” Please say yes. Please! He looked away again. “Sort of.” The world seemed to come apart at the seams. With hysteria clutching at her, Gia began running. She ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran for a cab that took her home, where she huddled in a corner of her apartment listening to the phone ring and ring and ring. She took it off the hook when Vicky came home from school and had barely spoken to Jack since.

  “COME AWAY FROM the window now. I’ll tell you when he arrives.”

  “No, Mommy! I want to see him!”

  “All right, but when he gets here, I don’t want you running around and making a fuss. Just say hello to him nice and politely, then go out back to the playhouse. Understand?”

  “Is that him?” Vicky started bouncing up and down on her toes. “Is that him?”

  Gia looked, then laughed and pulled on her daughter’s pigtails. “Not even close.”

  Gia walked away from the window, then came back, resigned to standing and watching behind Vicky. Jack appeared to occupy a blind spot in Vicky’s unusually incisive assessment of people. But then, Jack had fooled Gia, too.

  Jack fooled everyone, it seemed.

  9

  If Jack had his choice of
any locale in Manhattan in which to live, he’d choose Sutton Square, the half block of ultra-high-priced real estate standing at the eastern tip of Fifty-eighth Street off Sutton Place, dead-ending at a low stone wall overlooking a sunken brick terrace with an unobstructed view of the East River. No high-rises, condos, or office buildings there, just neat four-story townhouses standing flush to the sidewalk, all brick-fronted, some with the brick bare, others painted pastel colors. Wooden shutters flanked the windows and the recessed front doors. Some of them even had backyards. A neighborhood of Bentleys and Rolls Royces, liveried chauffeurs and white-uniformed nannies. And two blocks to the north, looming over it all like some towering guardian, stood the graceful, surprisingly delicate-looking span of the Queensboro Bridge.

  He remembered the place well. He had been here before. Last year when he had been doing that job for the U.K. Mission, he had met Gia’s aunts. They had invited him to a small gathering at their home. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Burkes had talked him into it. The evening had changed his life. He had met Gia.

  He heard a child’s voice shouting as he crossed Sutton Place.

  “Jack-Jack-Jack!”

  Dark braids flying and arms outstretched, a little slip of a girl with wide blue eyes and a missing front tooth came dashing out the front door and down the sidewalk. She leaped into the air with the reckless abandon of a seven-year-old who had not the slightest doubt she would be caught and lifted and swung around.

  Which is exactly what Jack did. Then he hugged her against his chest as she clamped her spindly arms around his neck.