by John Lutz
Quinn sipped, smoked, and mulled over some of those questions, but not all.
In another part of town, Jordan Kray was avidly reading the same papers, plus the Daily News.
He was famous, all right. Not as his real name, but that didn’t matter. He knew, in the heart and depths of his fear, that at some point his real name would be revealed. It would be engraved on his tombstone or plaque.
Not the brief stint he’d done in the military. That might never be known. Not for sure. He’d joined under another name, another age, another mission.
But he wouldn’t lose his professional name. The Gremlin. The ghost in the machine. He liked the ring of it. It was memorable. When he thought about it, the throbbing in his brain, the relentless thrashing sound, would usually subside.
People would visit his grave. The public would finally recognize the voracious fire of genuine greatness. And how it could consume the bearer of the gift.
They would know real fame, real celebrity, when they saw it, heard it, feared it. Right how it was merely a speck on the horizon, a red carpet unrolled.
Right now.
39
Missouri, 1999
Jordan Kray thought he’d be given a simple instruction by the farmer, whose name was Luther Farr: Get out.
But Luther apparently decided there might be too much risk involved. Things didn’t stop growing, or rotting, because the hired help was . . . precariously balanced. Jordan seemed all right physically. In fact, he was a good worker, and there was still a lot of work to be done around the farm.
Jordan understood that his days and nights at the farm were limited. There was no way the family or any of the other Freedom Farm workers would understand. He had dismembered the goat to investigate its bone structure, see the thickness of the bones and sinew that permitted such butting power in such a small animal. How could anyone not realize that nothing wrong had been done? The goat was one of those animals people relied upon. It was leather, it was insulation, it was meat.
It was also cuter than a cow, and possibly more intelligent. Closer to the human mind if not body of the cow or ox. Or even the horse. When you looked into goats’ eyes, they often looked back at you with a certain calculation. A message: We’re both smarter than the hens. We should be friends and partners.
But of course that wasn’t true. Not the last part, anyway.
You should be food. You should be sacrificial. Like in Sunday school.
What he didn’t know was that the goat was Jasmine’s favorite pet. And Jasmine was the farmer’s favorite daughter.
Jasmine was sixteen, but mature for her age. Jordan was fond of her, or at least saw her as a desirable object. She seemed to return his interest. In fact, he was sure she’d developed a crush on him.
That could be useful.
A few times, Luther Farr had caught his daughter smiling at Jordan in a way he didn’t like. But all that had happened so far were some cautionary, scathing looks. Still, Luther was planting the seed of fear in Jordan. And Luther was on the edge of understanding that a boy like Jordan wasn’t rich soil in which fear might thrive. Something quite different from fear had already taken root.
One evening, at Jordan’s request, he and Jasmine met secretly in a copse of elm trees. They were well beyond the farmhouse and its clapboard addition. The addition was where the help slept. Including Jordan.
There were half a dozen youths living and working at the farm. Jordan wasn’t the only one there who’d had minor brushes with the law. What did people expect, from someone usually alone and with practically no money? There was in the land a catalyst that not many people had to experience: Hunger. Usually it was hunger that drove Jordan to larceny. Hunger and cold sometimes teamed up to edge him toward more serious crimes.
(Though he didn’t think of them as crimes. Not by their strictest definition. If it was about survival, it wasn’t criminal.)
Jasmine, who had ripened that year with the crops, sat with her coltish legs crossed on a small blue blanket she’d brought with her. It was with great reluctance that she’d agreed to meet Jordan this evening. She was still heartbroken over the death of her pet goat, Sadie. Yet still she felt the magnetism of Jordan when he was near her. Like tonight.
“I just don’t understand why you did that to Sadie,” Jasmine said. Just thinking about it made her choke up so she could hardly breathe. But it was something she didn’t understand. She truly wanted to understand.
Jordan moved closer to her. The toe of his shoe was on a corner of the blue blanket, as if it were a magic carpet and with one foot he could hold it down so she couldn’t fly away. “I made sure she didn’t feel anything,” he lied. “I was humane. And you know your dad was going to sell the goat before winter. I saved her from a less humane death. Sometimes you have to be firm to be kind. Anybody grew up on a farm oughta know that.”
“But still . . .”
“Also, I needed to see how Sadie differed.”
“From what?”
“The other goats. I mean, inside. The bone and muscle, how it moved.”
She stared at him with unblinking blue eyes. He could see she was not even beginning to understand.
“I don’t see what the big deal is, if you think about it,” he said. “I mean, we eat goats. Parts of them, anyway. They’re even killed sometimes as part of religious ceremonies.”
“Says who?”
“Says the Bible, Jasmine. You’ve heard of blood sacrifices?”
“Usually it’s lambs that get sacrificed.”
“Well, a goat is a kind of lamb.”
“Not really.”
“Read your Bible,” Jordan said. “There are plenty of pictures of goats being sacrificed.” He wasn’t actually sure of that.
She had to admit that she’d seen such pictures, though she couldn’t recollect when or where. Sunday school, probably, during those services she’d been forced to attend. And he was right, people did eat lambs and goats.
“But not Sadie,” she said with brave certainty.
“It wouldn’t matter to the goat,” Jordan said. “Except in goat heaven, maybe.”
Jasmine suspected he was putting her on, but that didn’t make what he said untrue. Jordan liked to joke sometimes, and not take things serious that were serious. He was just like that, and when you came right down to it, she didn’t mind all that much. He knew more of the world than she did, though he wasn’t always as wise as he thought. He seemed kind of dangerous, even if he wasn’t all that large a man. You didn’t always see it, but it was there. She kind of liked that, too, in a way she didn’t quite understand.
Jordan squatted down on the blanket’s edge, producing a knife from somewhere. It wasn’t a switchblade or any other kind of pocketknife; it had a broad, flat blade that came to a honed point. Like a bowie knife.
He smiled at her, and began tossing the knife in front of him so that it penetrated the blanket and stuck in the soil.
“That’s the blanket I used for my dolls,” she said. Not warning him or asking him to stop. Simply giving him a nugget of partial understanding. A glimpse of her early childhood.
He continued to flip the knife expertly, so it made one revolution in the air and then stuck with the same solid chuk! in the ground beneath the blanket. The rhythmic, brutal sound, over and over, was hypnotic. Like something killing her childhood.
Jordan gazed deep into Jasmine’s eyes, holding her gaze so she couldn’t turn away.
Through an understanding smile he said, “The Bible tells us there comes a time to put away childish things.”
She knew that was true. She would have to face it someday. She fought back tears.
“I’ll be here in the morning,” Jordan said. “I’ll earn my final pay, then come evening I’ll be gone. If you’re here, we’ll leave together. A new life will be ours.”
He wiped the knife blade clean with two swipes on the side of his thigh, then slid it into a leather scabbard. She saw that it had a yellowed bone handl
e as he sat down on the blanket and leaned toward her, kissing her, using his tongue, teaching her how to use hers.
Still kissing her, he bent her backward and placed her gently on the blanket. He began to unbutton her blouse, her shorts. Her clothes seemed to melt from her. She gazed off to the side, like billions of women before her, and for a second or two became as much observer as participant.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not so soon. But now that it was happening, she didn’t mind. Time kept rushing toward her, past her.
She lay back, her elbows supporting her at first, then all the way back, and spread her legs, welcoming him.
Afterward, Jasmine couldn’t stop trembling. She knew what her father would think. Knew what he would tell her. It wouldn’t be about Jesus and the blood of the sacrificed. It would be about commerce. The food chain.
Every living thing required a reason to exist.
A usefulness.
“Even people?” she would ask.
“Especially people.”
“Why should that be?” she would ask.
She hadn’t yet heard a convincing answer.
40
Jordan worked hard on the farm the next day, standing near Jasmine’s father as the two of them shucked corn. Jasmine’s father, Luther, was a gangly, powerful man. He wasn’t intimidated, but he didn’t like meeting Jordan’s unconcerned gaze. Luther was smart in a direct, instinctive kind of way, and what he sensed in Jordan was a kind of darkness of the soul. An emptiness that in one way or another would have to be filled.
Luther had talked to his daughter earlier that day, and though she had told him nothing, he knew by looking at her that something had ended, and something had begun.
She could no more hide her feelings than could Luther. And Luther believed in God and demons and the reality of hell.
Side by side in the bright sunlight, the heat and humidity building, the two men shucking corn sometimes chanced to look at each other, and it was always Luther who turned away.
Jordan had a plan. Railroad dicks these days were mostly an invention of fiction. The expense of hiring so many of them just to keep freeloaders from traveling without tickets didn’t make good economic sense.
The boxcars were going north again, most of them emptied of coal and produce, jingling and jangling along the rails with their sliding doors open wide. More than half the boxcars were empty, the train’s engines so far ahead of them they were out of sight except where the rails curved.
After supper Jordan went out onto the porch, carrying a cold can of Budweiser. He was scheduled to meet Luther again in the morning and finish the bin of corn cobs. Both Luther and Jordan knew they probably wouldn’t see each other again.
The screen door slammed and reverberated in the quiet sinking light. Luther came out, carrying a can of chilled Bud like Jordan’s.
“Hot night,” he said to Jordan.
“That time of year,” Jordan said.
Luther glanced around. It was an obvious act. “Jasmine around?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Seen her go upstairs after supper,” Luther said. “Guess she’s still up there.” There was a high tension emanating from him, a crippling regret. The past was over. The future was going to change in a way that made Luther sick and afraid.
He’d known this day would come. When the cancer had gotten his wife, Jasmine’s mother, Luther was left with Jasmine and her memories. He lived with his regrets. The silent truths that both knew were left unsaid. Nothing could stop them from working their dreaded damage.
He couldn’t leave the farm, and nothing would compel Jasmine to stay in a house haunted by her mother. A family had been destroyed by death. Luther knew what quiet horror would haunt his final days, and perhaps his eternity,
He hesitated, seemed about to say something more to Jordan, then lowered his head and turned away.
“See you come sunrise,” he said.
Jordan didn’t answer. Luther didn’t look back.
The eleven o’clock American Eagle sounded its lonely trailing wail. Jordan thought it was like a wolf howl, carried on the wind.
He and Jasmine each carried a duffel bag just large enough for a change of clothes and some personal items. Jasmine had stood frozen in her bedroom before leaving, knowing it was the last time she’d see so many things, keepsakes, pictures, her mussed and longtime bed with its sheet dragging the floor.
Jordan had warned her: there was no way to move on without leaving the past behind.
Wasn’t that the truth?
The Eagle wailed again. Jordan knew it would be audible back at the farmhouse, but not loud enough to wake anyone. Especially if they were used to it, as was Luther Farr.
The mournful sound of the train whistle signaled that it would soon be part of the past, and the past would be fixed in time and place.
Carrying their bags slung over their shoulders, Jordan and Jasmine jogged so their course would cross that of the train tracks. But they wouldn’t cross the rails. They would stop at them, then wait.
Seconds became minutes, then the Eagle came at them at an angle out of the east. It started small and then grew slowly, coming at them faster and faster. They watched in the moonlight as boxcar after boxcar, most of them empty and with opened doors on each side, clanged and clattered past.
As they’d agreed, approaching the train from the side at a forty-five-degree angle, Jordan hung back so he could run alongside. Then he quickly mounted a small side ladder near the front of a boxcar’s open door. In the same smooth motion, he tossed his duffel bag in, then pulled himself up and around and into the boxcar.
He swiveled so he was on his hands and knees, looking ahead for Jasmine. For a moment a voice in his mind told him she wasn’t coming with him. What was a promise from a girl so young? To a boy not much older?
He edged closer where he was kneeling at the open boxcar door, and there she was.
Jordan watched fascinated as she followed his instructions perfectly. First she hung on to the ladder of the moving car and with her free hand tossed her duffel bag up through the gaping side door. Then she gripped the small steel ladder built into the side of the car. Made her way along the side of the bouncing, clanging car, to the open door. As Jordan had taught her, she grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands and swung out and then inside the boxcar,
But only halfway.
Her heart took flight like a startled bird, then Jordan’s strong hand closed around her wrist. He pulled, pulled, her shins sliding and banging painfully against the floor’s edge.
Then she was in!
They lay together on the boxcar’s rough plank floor, the train jouncing and squealing and very gradually building up speed. Fresh air streamed in through the open doors, along with the smell of the worked earth.
The train held its speed and the ride became smoother, the boxcar swaying in a gentle, rocking rhythm. The steel wheels began a steady ticking sound. The night breeze—or was it the moonlight?—played over them. Jordan and Jasmine were out in the endless fields and prairies, their dreams intact.
A man’s voice from the dark shadows at the far end of the boxcar said, “I was glad to see you both made it.”
41
New York, the present
Renz, seated behind his airport-size desk in his office, handed a photograph to Quinn. He had leaned so far over the desk, so he could reach Quinn’s outstretched hand, that Renz’s purple tie dragged and got defaced by what looked like eraser crumbs. Or were they pastry crumbs?
Whatever they were, Renz saw Quinn staring at them and deftly brushed them off and onto the floor behind the desk.
Quinn concentrated on the photo. It was in black and white, and grainy.
“It’s a still from a security camera,” Renz said. “From four nights ago, ten thirty-five p.m. Outside the Devlin Building over on Twelfth Street. The guys who run the coffee shop inside have been bitching about drug deals going down in the passageway. That’s also whe
re a big Dumpster sits, gets emptied every two weeks.”
“So what makes them think this isn’t a drug deal? Or some scroungers looking for a late meal?”
“Look closer at it.”
Quinn moved slightly sideways so a better light would show on the photo.
“That was the best the tech guys could do,” Renz said.
Quinn was looking at a slight figure, maybe a woman, turning and running away from what looked like a Dumpster. She was clutching something white in her (or his) hand, and looking back, as if to make sure no one was following. The camera angle was from approximately ten feet above the subject and at a sharp angle, so her face was barely visible. She was wearing a baseball cap, either blue or black, with the bill pulled down low so her features would be obscured. It did appear that the subject was glancing back.
Renz handed Quinn a magnifying glass. Quinn held the photo at the same angle to the sun and observed through the curved lens.
“That white object the character has in his or her hand looks like a foam takeout box from a restaurant,” Quill said.
“Yeah, but look at the ear.”
Quinn did. The subject’s right ear seemed to protrude at a sharp angle from his head, and might very well be pointed. If it wasn’t simply a shadow. Or an errant lock of hair.
Quinn said, “I don’t know, Harley. Times are tough. This looks like somebody snapped a photo of a Dumpster-diver scouting around for dinner.”
“Or it could be our Gremlin on the run. Taking meals whenever and however possible.”
“With another killer with him? A copycat? Who’d want to be mixed up with a guy who slices and dices people?”
“Somebody who doesn’t know what he’s bumming around with. The worst of these sickos can seem the nicest and least dangerous. That’s their cover, how they camouflage themselves.”
“The public seen this photo?” Quinn asked.