Child of Fire

by Harry Connolly

  “What is this? What bullshit is this?”

  I was losing her, but I had to risk it. “How do you think he’s been so successful? Even Able Katz doesn’t understand it. You remember when I said every business has a boom and bust? Katz knows that Hammer Bay Toys should have had a bust by now. Even a little one. But they haven’t.”

  “Where is this going?”

  “The guy is making his success happen another way, and the whole town is paying the price.”

  Bobby was looking at me like I was old fish. I couldn’t read the look in Tiffany’s eyes at all. Phyllis was squinting suspiciously at me again. “What price is this supposed to be?”

  I sat back in my chair. “Where are the kids? Where are the kids in your town? The school yards are empty. The parks, too.”

  Bobby turned to Phyllis. “This dude is out of his mind.”

  I watched Phyllis’s face. “Imagine what they’d say if you told them about the Dubois brothers.”

  Phyllis kept staring at me. “Are you saying he’s made everyone sterile or something?”

  “Worse. I’m saying the kids were here, but now they’re gone and no one can remember them. How many girls do you have who have kids? It seems like it should be a pretty common thing for working girls to have a couple of kids. How many do?”

  “We look after our girls here,” she said. Her jaw was thrust forward, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge what I was saying, but her eyes looked troubled.

  “What about your boys? How many of them are married with kids?”

  “There’s Ty, and Thomas, and, uh, Richard.”

  “That’s it? Ty, Thomas, and Richard? Three guys out of how many? And how many of those men drive station wagons or minivans-cars no guy would own if he wasn’t a father? Your future is almost gone, and you don’t even realize it.”

  Tiffany turned toward Phyllis. “I don’t like what he’s saying.” She stood and circled the table toward me. I tensed, putting both feet on the floor.

  Bobby slipped his hand into his pocket. I stayed put.

  Tiffany bent over me and patted my face. Her hands were soft but clumsy. She smelled like baby powder. “You must have been having a bad dream or something.” She tilted my face up and looked into my eyes. She had the stare of a praying mantis. After a few seconds, she saw what she wanted to see and went back to her chair.

  “Do you see those men behind you?” Phyllis asked. I turned and looked at them. “Any one of them,” she continued, “would put a bullet in your head if I asked them to.” Behind me, Bobby coughed. “We could drop your body in the rain forest. No one would find you. No one’s found any of them.”

  I turned back to her. “Killing people is easy,” I said. “It doesn’t impress me. What would impress me is if you could wake up and see what’s going on.”

  “All that talking must have left you parched,” Tiffany said. “Why-“

  “Tiff,” Phyllis said sharply. “The boys over there are getting bored. Why don’t you talk to them for a while?”

  Tiffany looked a little stung as she retreated toward the door. I didn’t pay much attention.

  “So,” Phyllis said, “How is it that you can blow into town and see what’s going on, but we can’t?”

  I couldn’t tell her anything about Annalise or the spells she’d put on me. “Willingness to believe,” I said. It was the wrong moment to play coy with her, but I didn’t have a choice. Annalise was already unhappy that I’d showed the scrap of wood to Emmett Dubois. I didn’t want to repeat the mistake.

  “What about your lady friend?”

  “Never mind her.”

  Phyllis turned to Bobby, “Speaking of which, they’re late.”

  Bobby took out a cell phone and started to dial.

  Oh no.

  Phyllis looked at me. “We’ll ask her when she gets here.”

  “You didn’t send men after her, did you? You didn’t give them guns or anything?”

  “Don’t break a sweat, kid, I told them not to hurt her.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The salty chips had made me thirsty; I took a swallow of iced tea just to bide my time. So much for recruiting Henstrick. I felt a little dizzy.

  “No answer,” Bobby said.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “They’re dead.”

  Phyllis glared at me. “What do you mean, dead?”

  “I mean, if you sent men to strong-arm my boss the way they’ve been trying to strong-arm me-with guns and knives and bad manners-they are dead. Thirty men couldn’t kidnap my boss. Get it? If you want to talk to her, visit her yourself or send someone to ask politely.”

  My head started to feel light. The lights went dim. I suddenly felt very tired.

  “Dammit,” I heard Phyllis say. Her voice sounded far away. “Send someone after them. Find out what’s going on.”

  Then, darkness. My last thought was that I was helpless now. They could do anything they wanted to me. I took that thought into oblivion.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I awoke suddenly. I was sitting up, leaning against a pile of pillows. My hands were bound.

  I’d been handcuffed to the post of a bed. I rolled off the mattress. I didn’t want to think about who had been on it before.

  Each of my wrists had a handcuff of its own. One end was locked on me; the other end was locked tightly around the thinnest spot in the post, which was about the width of my two thumbs. It looked like a hack setup, but after ten minutes of trying I still hadn’t managed to free myself. So much for hack.

  The room was slightly more homey than a hospital room but slightly less homey than a Best Western. The wallpaper, curtains, and bedcovers were decorated with a dense, multicolored pattern that reminded me of a counter at a diner, like they were designed to hide stains.

  A big LED clock on the bedside stand told me the time was 8:45. There were no windows anywhere, so I couldn’t tell if it was morning or evening. I was hungry again. Damn.

  No one had left any saws or key rings nearby. I wanted my ghost knife. I closed my eyes and reached for it, searching for the slightest tickle that would tell me it was close. Nothing. If I survived this, I’d have to practice sensing the ghost knife from farther and farther away.

  I wrapped my arms around the post, stood on the box spring, and laid my shoulder into it, using my weight to try to break it off. No good. A better plan would have been to kick the top of the post, but that would have made noise. I didn’t want to let people know that I’d woken up.

  I lay back on the bed, set my heels on the top of the post, and grabbed the chain of the cuffs. Then I pressed with my feet, holding myself in place with the cuffs. I had leverage, but the strain on my wrists prevented me from using my full strength.

  I heard a key turn in the lock. I redoubled my efforts, gritting my teeth against the pain, but I didn’t hear the slightest sound of cracking wood.

  The door opened. A voice said, “You were right. He’s up.”

  “Hear hear,” a woman said. “Stop that right now.”

  I let my feet drop to the ground and stood. A man and a woman approached me. They were in their late forties and looked as average as any supermarket shopper. He was balding and walked with a plump shuffle. She was heavily done up and carefully balanced on high heels.

  She carried a tray with a platter of fish and chips on it. “Here you go, dear. You’ve been up here a couple hours, and I’m sure you’re hun-“

  I kicked the platter out of her hands. Greasy fish and dark vinegar splashed onto the ceiling and wallpaper opposite us. “Go fuck yourself.”

  The woman stepped back. “Well!”

  The man became indignant. “You have some nerve,” he said, huffing out his cheeks.

  “Try it!” I shouted at him, my voice rebounding off the walls of the room. They were taken aback by how quickly things had escalated. “Even with my hands cuffed I’ll stomp you.”

  The woman laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. Her long, fake nails dug
into his shoulder.

  I shut my eyes, closing out as much of the rest of the world as I could. I felt for the ghost knife. Nothing. The supermarket shoppers weren’t carrying it. They turned and left.

  I rolled back onto the bed and returned to working on the post. The encounter with the shoppers had fired my anger, and I strained even harder, but I couldn’t crack the damn wood. If they already knew I was awake, there was no reason to keep quiet. I lay on my back and started kicking the top of the post.

  Kick kick kick. I wasn’t being secretive or clever about it. I wasn’t in the mood for either. Tools would have been great, but I didn’t have any. If I could have tipped the bed on its side, I would have laid my weight against the frame and broken the post that way, but I couldn’t move my hands far enough to get decent leverage on the whole bed. So I kicked and kicked, letting my anger block some of the pain as the cuffs dug into my wrists.

  Finally, I heard wood crack. I began to kick frantically then, until the wood splintered enough that the post bent at an angle.

  I rolled to my feet and put my shoulder against it, breaking it off. I was free.

  I lifted the broken hunk of wood. The empty ends of the handcuffs swung free.

  The lock on the door clicked and the door opened. Bobby entered. He held a.38 in his hand. “You’ve been making a lot of noise up here.”

  “Quietly waiting to be killed is too hifalutin for me.”

  He didn’t seem to remember the reference, and I didn’t care. He waved at me with the gun, encouraging me to follow him. I tossed the broken post aside and followed him into the hall. There were three more men waiting out there, along with Tiffany.

  She was looking at me like a hungry dog eyeing a steak.

  I knew right then, from the look on their faces, that they were taking me away to kill me.

  “We found our boys,” Bobby said.

  “The ones you sent for my boss?”

  “They were friends of mine.”

  I wanted to tell him that was the price of playing gangster, but there was no point. “Next time you want to talk to her, be sure to use the magic word.”

  “I think we’ll send her a different sort of message.”

  I looked at the other men. They had guns but didn’t look happy to be there. They weren’t gunmen; they were carpenters or Sheetrockers or what ever. They looked like guys with an unpleasant job to do and they looked like they wanted to get it over with.

  Bobby twisted my arms behind my back and clamped the empty ends of the handcuffs onto my wrists. I’d never been double-cuffed before. I guessed they were a little nervous about me.

  There were doors along both sides of the hall. The carpet was deep red with faint brown stains.

  Bobby turned to the fattest of them. “Bring the van around to the back.”

  “I hope that’s not your personal van,” I said to his retreating back. “Bloodstains don’t come out.”

  Tiffany’s expression was still, but her eyes were wide with wonder. “I want to do it. Is that all right? I brought my knife. I want to do it.” She sounded a little breathless.

  “Shut up,” Bobby said. He wasn’t taking any pleasure in this, but he was being professional about it.

  “I’ll make it quick, if you want,” she said, and glanced back at me. “I can do it what ever way you want.”

  “Fine,” Bobby said. “Just shut up about it.”

  We started walking down the hall. Tiffany was ahead of me on the left, leading the way. Her stride was measured and careful, as though she was hyperaware of herself and her surroundings. Bobby was behind me again, this time on my left as well. A young, clear-eyed kid who seemed barely out of high school was behind me on the right. In front of me on the right was the same tubby, middle-aged guy who had searched me in the Chevy van. I wondered if he was still carrying my things. I also wondered why I was cooperating with my killers.

  I stopped walking and turned around. The kid nearly bumped into me. Bobby lifted his gun and pointed it at my heart. “Keep going,” he said.

  The kid followed Bobby’s lead. He pointed his gun at my chest, although he was still much closer to me than he should have been.

  I closed my eyes. I could feel the ghost knife behind me.

  “Why should I make this easy for you?” I asked.

  If Bobby had been smart, he would have lied. He would have told me that he didn’t really want to kill me, that he was going to let me go if I promised to disappear so completely that his boss never found out. But he’d seen too many movies. “Because if you don’t,” he said, “you’re going to hurt. A lot.”

  I reached for my spell. The ghost knife slid out of the chubby man’s pocket and landed in my hand. At the same moment, I heard Tubby sigh and stagger. It must have passed through part of him on the way to me.

  I looked at the ceiling. They did, too. I cut the handcuff chain with my ghost knife. My hands were free.

  The next part happened very fast.

  I swept my left hand upward as quickly as possible and struck the kid’s gun arm, batting it aside. The gun went off, but the barrel was already pointing past me. I heard the boom of the shot and felt the rush of air as it passed my shoulder.

  At the same time, I threw the ghost knife at Bobby’s gun. Again, I was too slow. Bobby squeezed the trigger.

  I felt the pressure of the bullet striking my chest, but there was no pain. He killed me, I thought. Shouldn’t it hurt if he killed me?

  Hot gas billowed over my neck, and a burning speck struck beside my Adam’s apple. The spot where he’d shot me didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything there. There would be no wound, either, if Annalise’s tattoos had held. I didn’t look down to check.

  The ghost knife slid through Bobby’s gun, cutting it in two, then vanished into his chest. I heard him gasp.

  My back was still exposed, and I’d left the kid too long. I lunged at him, punching him on the side of the head and ripping the weapon from his hand. I grabbed the back of his head, spinning him between me and Tubby and Tiffany.

  I didn’t have to worry. Tiffany was frozen in place; what ever she’d imagined would happen, this wasn’t it. And Tubby was on his knees, a bloody gunshot wound in his chest. Then he fell onto his back. He wasn’t going to get up again.

  I don’t remember a lot about the next few seconds. There was a feeling of tremendous pressure inside my skull. I know I didn’t shoot the kid’s gun. I know Tiffany was much quicker with her knife than I’d expected, and I hit her too hard on the side of her face.

  What I do remember is standing over Bobby, Tiffany, and the other two and slicing the kid’s bloody gun in two. One of Bobby’s teeth was still wedged in the barrel.

  I’d broken their bones, but at least they’d live. They were better off than Tubby. It took every ounce of willpower I had to keep from vomiting all over them.

  Doors all along the hallway swung open and heads poked out. Geniuses. They hear gunshots and rush toward them. The peeping face nearest to me was Rev. Wilson.

  I stepped around the bodies on the floor to the dead man. He had forgotten to shave that morning. I took Cabot’s gun from him and pocketed it. I also took back my wallet and keys.

  After a moment of indecision, Wilson rushed toward me. He was wearing long black pants but no shirt. “What is happening here?” He looked me in the eye for the first time.

  “These guys need an ambulance,” I said. “But I’m afraid this guy is gone.” I was talking too fast. I wanted to be cool and collected, but I felt anything but.

  “Why did you-” Wilson began.

  I heard a commotion behind me. Three more men had appeared at the far end of the hall. They rushed toward me, guns in hand. One held a walkie-talkie to his mouth.

  “Help them,” I said, and rushed past him. Another man rounded the corner of the hall ahead of me.

  The door nearest to me was the one Rev. Wilson had come out of. I ducked inside and locked the door. I had a gun, but I didn’t want to use
it. There were too many people around, and I wasn’t some badass hitman. Also, I had already gotten more lucky than I deserved. If Bobby had aimed at my head instead of my heart…

  A woman was standing next to me. She was stark naked and unashamed. I guessed she was about forty-five, with long, auburn hair and a simple, honest face. Wilson had good taste.

  “What’s going on out there?” she asked.

  “General naughtiness.”

  She reached toward my chest and tugged at the bullet hole in my shirt. It was scorched with powder burns. “I see that,” she said.

  For a moment I thought she would panic just as I was about to. “I don’t want trouble-“

  “Of course not. Come this way.” She led me through the room into a second, smaller room. She was very calm. “Bobby and the boys have been getting worse and worse over the last few years. They used to be working guys protecting their own. Lately they’ve been acting like thugs.”

  There was a second door, next to a window that showed the forest slope behind. It was the way out. She took a key ring from a hook. “Not everyone wants to come in through the casino. We have a couple of rooms with a back door.”

  She unlocked the door and swung it open. The sun had gone down, but there was still a little light in the sky. I stepped out onto a metal staircase. There was a little carport four stories down.

  I turned toward the naked woman. “Thank you.”

  A shot ricocheted off the metal stairs. I didn’t see where it came from, and I didn’t hang around to find out. I pushed my way back inside and shut the door. I heard the faint sound of construction boots running up the metal steps.

  Damn. So much for sneaking out the back.

  I ran back into the bedroom. The knob rattled but didn’t turn. Someone’s meaty fist pounded on the door.

  “Keep out!” the woman yelled. “He’s got a gun!”

  For a moment, I thought that she could see it in my jacket pocket, but then I realized that she was just buying time. She came close to me and said in a low voice, “The cops-“