Nightjack

by Tom Piccirilli

  “You went shopping?”

  “Pia did,” Faust said. “Map told her about a small shopping area a few miles up the road. She made a very passable lobster bisque while you were sleeping.”

  He stepped into the kitchen and saw the bisque in a huge pot on the stove. He retreated and asked, “Where’s Dr. Brandt?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Where’s Pia now?”

  Hayden looked up from the endless letter. “She’s gone. Left about a half-hour ago. She wanted to hit a club. Alone.”

  A dull frown crimped Faust’s face. “She was rather rude about it. She demanded that we stay here.”

  “Said she’d break our asses if we followed. Not sure how we were supposed to try to follow her, but even if we could’ve we wouldn’t have. The mongoloids knew how to dance but they never taught me.”

  “Quite adamant about the breaking of asses part. Even after I praised her bisque. That girl has no manners. Our father who art insulting.”

  Pace said, “And you let her go?”

  “She’s not a prisoner.” Hayden’s handwriting got worse and worse as he pressed harder into the paper. He was scratching deeply, stabbing his pen in. “None of us are prisoners, right? We didn’t escape the nuthatch just to be locked down by you, eh? Besides, we’re just going to fly to Greece soon to meet with the guy who wants us dead. So where’s the harm?”

  “She could hurt herself.”

  “You kidding me? She’s nearly as good as Jack with a knife. She’s sliced up a couple of her foster fathers, didn’t you hear her?”

  “Which club did she go to?”

  Pace heard naked padding footsteps on the steps and looked to see Jane coming down the stairs.

  Her red hair was an erotic chaos, disheveled from sleep. Wearing the sleek satin white lingerie he’d bought her for Christmas, the same year she’d bought him the blue bathrobe and slippers. Her freckled cleavage was prominently displayed, one shoulder strap having fallen aside. Pace’s breath caught in his throat and he reached a hand out to the wall to keep from going over—all these things, no matter how small, easily pushing him over—as Jane came to him. He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes and stood there, motionless.

  “Will—”

  Again with the Will. Always with the Will.

  “Will, what’s wrong?”

  He had a hundred names and he hated Will the most, even more than Nightjack. He kept his hand on the wall, his other arm pinned at his side. You could do a lot of crazy shit in front of the other loonies, but don’t make a lunge for your dead wife. That would really look bad.

  “Will, listen to me—”

  He opened his eyes and there she was—Dr. Brandt right there before him, still dressed in her suit, but with the jacket and the shoes off, the blouse unbuttoned one button too far. The hint of her pink bra enough to drive sane men out of their trees and nutcases right out of the forest and down the mountain.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see you for a second.” After all the thousands of pills, the therapy and treatments and group discussions, she was just another failed mother who couldn’t help her fucked-up kids. “Pia’s gone.”

  She said, “I fell asleep.”

  Faust chuckled again but this time it came out all wrong. Laced with hysteria and broken up with a series of effeminate burps. Maybe he really was drunk. He said, “I can’t sleep, you know. I haven’t slept in years.” Rimmon and Sariel nodded, so tired that they sagged against their sword hilts. “God doesn’t allow it. I am being punished for my many sins.” He took a long pull on his beer and belched out a whine.

  “We need to go after her,” Dr. Brandt said, the pink drawing closer. “Somehow. The storm is much worse. It’s terrible out there.”

  “I’ll go alone,” Pace said.

  “I should be with you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.” Pace placed his hand over the page where Hayden was going on and on to his mother, shredding the paper. “Where did Pia go?”

  “She asked Map for directions to Le Feu in Southampton. That place where he said he and his wife used to go.” His eyes were calm now even though his hand flashed in a frenzy. Spelling out very clearly Mama, Mama, they’re going to kill me. Mama, I’m going to die soon. “Pia went out dancing. With her father.”

  twelve

  Before he went to Nam, P.I. Sam Smith was known to boost a car or two. Him and his best friend Jimmy Lee Clark, who died in Phu Da in ‘72 when Beaucoup VC broke through the concertina wire and threw him across his own M-79 grenade launcher, an illumination round exploding in his face.

  Sam and Jimmy Lee would cut school and grab a late model Chevrolet off the street in Hell’s Kitchen, drive around for a day or two, and then return it pretty close to where they’d nabbed it from.

  It was a skill that occasionally came in handy when Sam was trailing some middle-aged husband stepping out on his wife, heading down to Atlantic City for a night, and Smith’s own ‘87 Datsun wouldn’t start. He’d just boost a car from nearby, tail the husband, get the photographic evidence he needed outside one of the casinos, and then return the car to within a block of where he picked it up. He’d call Triple A and wait for the tow truck to come get his own piece of shit and haul it off.

  Sam was drenched after a mile hike in the nor’easter. He hated the cold rain coming down and kept shaking his fist at the ocean. He didn’t have many cars to choose from at the market where Pia had gotten the ingredients to make her bisque. A Civic and an old Buick Skylark that looked like it might float out of the flooded parking lot.

  A row of large cabins nearby offered only a Ford Ranger with a horse trailer and a Mercedes that he knew he wouldn’t be able to break into without the proper equipment. He unhitched the horse trailer, slipped into the Ranger, and found the keys already in it. Nice.

  Map had given Pace directions to Le Feu. He found the club and was surprised at how much action there was, even in the storm. Le Feu was on the water, backed up to a raging channel. Fifty or more skiffs, Pro Elite bass boats, 15-footers, outboards, and water taxis were docked at the pier, vessels colliding as the turbulent waves washed over the jetty. Rich kids who didn’t give a shit about safety.

  He spotted the Jag parked down on the sand, marooned in three feet of water, scuttled.

  The front of the place was crowded with twenty-somethings drinking under the wide overhangs. A bouncer stood framed in the door: clean-cut, muscle-bound guy with no neck. Black T-shirt with a logo emblazoned across it in white. Pace walked up unsure of the procedure. There would be some kind of arcane process to join them, he was sure of it, and was certain he’d fail the trial.

  He put on his most disarming smile and approached, pushing drenched hair out of his eyes. He wasn’t even close when the guy held up a beefy arm semaphore-style across the partially submerged walkway.

  “You can’t come in.”

  “Why not?”

  The bouncer stood there not saying anything, just giving Pace a dead look. You had to hand it to no-neck, he had a good eye and could see trouble coming from a distance. He knew Pace was going to get into something here. Pace still had the knife but it was concealed beneath his shirt and jacket. It wasn’t difficult hiding 12.4 ounces.

  “Look, I don’t want any trouble,” Pace said, like he was reading it off a cue card.

  “And there’s not going to be any. That’s what I get paid for.”

  “Right, I get that. But this is important. I need to find a friend of mine.”

  The bouncer let his bottom lip hang, showing a couple of empty spaces and some very cheap bridgework. “You can make new friends someplace else. Right up the road there’s a couple other clubs, The Riot and Oceanic. I bet you’d like those places better.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “Sure I am.”

  “I have to get my friend.”

  “Can’t help you there, chum.” The arm moved a few inches but still didn’t touch Pace’s chest. “Now how about if
you move it along, eh?” Saying it like a beat cop on the street pushing a bum aside with his billy club.

  Girls wearing thin blouses and transparent raincoats shuddered in the corners of the doorway, laughing drunkenly while the music blared inside. The rain sluiced over the roof and fell in great torrents from the gutters. No one else seemed to realize that there was a hurricane in the making.

  Feeling the tempest inside and outside, Pace stood there wondering how to play it. If he should fight, if he should continue to argue. Get a manager over, raise a stink. No matter how large your fate loomed, you always had to handle the moment-to-moment stupid tyrannies of life.

  He would be in Greece soon with oracles providing him a hundred destinies for a hundred men, but for now he had to deal with this petty situation.

  The knife was in his hand and then out of it.

  Suggestion and instant rejection, without having to make any conscious choice at all. What would happen next? What would the hands do next?

  Then he saw that he’d pulled out two of Vindi’s hundred dollar bills.

  He’d crumpled and jammed them up the bouncer’s nose.

  Shit, that wasn’t good. That wasn’t the best approach to the situation. He wanted to yell at his hands for making such a stupid move. What was this fixation with jamming stuff up other guys’ noses? You had to be sick to do a thing like that.

  The bouncer let out an angry warble and started to lunge. Pace brought his forearm up hard into the guy’s throat. The balled bills shot out of no-neck’s nostrils and he gagged and flopped back into a six inch puddle.

  Here we go.

  Another bouncer passing by the doorway rushed over swinging his big arms, shouting out a string of curses. Pace spun fluidly and flipped the guy over his shoulder so that the new no-neck did a complete somersault in the air. He came down in a heap and lay there moaning.

  One of the girls let out a delighted cackle, a few others began to scream. Pace rushed inside, threading quickly through the crowd.

  The music pounded. He passed dozens of young men at the bar using pick-up lines that were old when Jack had slipped by the fog-shrouded whores. And the girls, secure in their youth, laughed ceaselessly.

  A throng of bodies pressed against him, inside and out. He flexed his shoulders and forced his way through the crowd. He scanned left and right, watching the corners. He should’ve known better.

  Because there, in the center of the dance floor, Pia grooved with her daddy.

  “Christ.”

  Pia’s father was in his late forties, without a gray hair on his head. He had a thick, well-trimmed mustache and was a little too caught up in the whole ‘70's revival thing. He wore flared cuffs, a chocolate brown suit with matching vest, his shirt collar hanging over the jacket collar. Still, he didn’t look as out of place as he should have.

  The man liked to twirl and bump. Turned out he was a better dancer than his daughter was. Spinning on his heels, sticking his rump out. Pia laughed and tried her best to hang in there, but the guy really could pull a few amazing moves. He’d go down to one knee, do a split, whirl about skillfully, then hop back up and shake it with her. You’d never guess the guy liked to visit Revolutionary War sites.

  When Pia was thirteen her father was brought up on formal charges of child abuse by her older sister, who’d been out of the house for six months. She told the cops that her father had sexually abused her for years, and only stopped coming to her bedroom once he’d started molesting Pia instead.

  The day he was arrested he hanged himself in the police precinct bathroom even before they’d fingerprinted him. He’d come ready with a piano wire he’d clipped off the family piano. The wire had been wrapped around his chest, under his shirt. He must’ve done it the minute he saw the police pulling up at his curb.

  Pia’s mother protested her husband’s innocence and blamed Pia and the sister for the man’s death. She threatened to kill them both, went wild around the neighborhood chasing both her kids with a shovel. She was arrested about a minute after she brained the sister. Three ambulances showed up but none in time. Pia held her sister while the girl died.

  The mother killed herself in the same bathroom as her husband, having sneaked in a bottle of drain cleaner. Like the man, she must’ve just been waiting for the chance, having packed the poison in a baggie tied to her thigh.

  These people, devious as fucking ninjas.

  After the sister was buried Pia was placed in foster care. The family that took her in had dealt with many troubled children before. By all accounts, it was a loving home, and Pia was treated with great patience, understanding, and consideration. She went after her foster father with a meat cleaver. They turned her over to another foster family, one made of sterner stuff. Stricter rules, more wary foster parents. She got her hands on a pair of gardening shears and lopped the guy’s left ear off.

  She wasn’t fourteen yet. Social Services decided to give her one more try. They put her in a home run by a retired Marine colonel who had six military brats of his own and six foster kids. She stabbed him in the testicles with a trowel stolen out of the garage and was shipped off to Garden Falls.

  Pia saw Pace coming at her and moved so that her father was between them. The man bumping and grinding against her, ass to ass, while Pace watched and tried to decipher why she needed her daddy so much, in this way.

  When Pace he was close enough she said, “It’s a bad night to be out.”

  “For everyone. Not stopping anybody here though.”

  “They’re having too much fun.”

  “So are you. I want you to come back to the house with me.”

  “I’m safer where I am.”

  He had to think about that for a second. “Maybe not.”

  The kids on the floor moved around Pace like one creature shifting, deaf and blind, edging forward and rearing away.

  He reached out and took Pia by the wrist, realizing at once it was the wrong thing to do. He loosened his grip but didn’t let go. Her father coiled past and continued grinding, bumping asses with Pace now, grooving, always grooving.

  The man said, “My little girl’s not going anywhere with you. She’s with me tonight. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other. Right, buttercup?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” she told him, voice heavy with lust. She snapped her arm free from Pace and started dancing again.

  “We’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for, sugarplum.” The man leaning in, exposing his throat. Pia kissed him there, then began nibbling on his earlobe. “That’s my good girl. My sweetie pumpkin pie.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  This was how she saw her father now, the dead in relation to herself. This wasn’t the war buff who took his family on trips in the summer, the roadside attraction freak who traveled the country looking at chickens that never lost at tic-tac-toe. This was how she saw him now, as defined by her own self-hatred: vapid, perverse, obvious.

  Pace wished the guy still had some piano wire on him. He would enjoy pulling the garrote taut, watching the bastard’s head go flying.

  “I love to boogie with my baby girl!” Her father thrust his groin forward at Pia, then at Pace. “You gonna try something with me, buddy? You gonna make your move now?”

  “Please, Daddy—”

  “Shh, honeybunch, pun’kin. Don’t interrupt. Daddy is talking.”

  You could fight a lot of things, but you could never win out over the love a daddy’s girl had for her father. Pace stared at the man, focusing himself. His hand flashed out, grabbed Pia’s wrist again and held on this time. Maybe that’s all she’d ever wanted, was for someone to not let go.

  The music grew even louder now. The other dancers completely ignored him. Pace got up close to Pia and spoke in her ear. “We need to leave. Now. We have to get back to the others.”

  “You afraid of a little bad weather?”

  “No.”

  “You like it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “
You want the whole world to drown.”

  The squall called to him. A part of him, several parts of him, wanted to go out and battle the sea once more. He’d made the proper offerings at long last, his odyssey completed. Poseidon had forgiven him and would finally watch over Troy’s favorite son. He’d been away for almost twenty years. He had a wife to win back, a kingdom to reconquer.

  “Don’t make me leave my father again,” Pia begged.

  “I won’t. We’ll take him with us, all right?”

  The man was swinging all over the place. Pia had been trying hard to keep up and her hair was sticky with sweat. “Dr. Brandt is always telling me I have to leave him behind. She told me to divorce myself from him, as if I were his wife!”

  “She’s not a very good psychiatrist,” Pace admitted. “She’s got a lot of troubles of her own.”

  “What troubles?”

  “She’s in love with me.”

  “That bitch is so judgmental! Giving me that glower, as if I deserved what happened to me.”

  “You did,” her father said. “Honey bunny pecan pie, you wanted my love. I had to show you that I loved you. That you were wanted. You hated being alone in your bed. You’d climb in between me and your mother. You’d roll over and sit up on me.”

  “I know, Daddy.”

  No matter how deep someone went inside, there were always more layers underneath. It was easy to find the place where fear, love, and shame bundled together into tightly-knit fibers as dense as the tissue of the human heart. But you could never cut through it. You couldn’t burn it. One chamber led to another. You never got to the bottom of yourself. The discovery of who you were never really started and never fully finished. You’d be in therapy for fifty years and still say to the doctor, “Oh yeah, and another thing...”

  Her father turned to Pace, searching his eyes. “And you, you insane murderous son of a bitch. Are you like the rest of them? Do you hate me?”

  “Yes,” Pace said.

  “Why?”

  “You abused your little girls. You took advantage of the ones you were supposed to keep from harm.”