Applaud the Hollow Ghost (24 page)

I finally found a scissors and went to work on the rope just beyond the slip knot at the back of his neck. The scissors were dull and Casey was no help, constantly twisting his neck, squirming around and trying to wrestle his arms free. I told him to sit still, but he didn't. His eyes were wild with pain and fear.

“Damn it, Casey!” I finally yelled, my voice too angry, far louder than I wanted, as though he were to blame. “Sit still!”

He stopped struggling abruptly, and there was apology—maybe even humiliation—in his eyes. But still the fear, also. I sawed away with the scissors until the rope finally frayed, then snapped.

Even after I loosened the rope around his neck he struggled, trying to breathe. Maybe what he'd wanted to tell me was to get his mouth free first. Still using the scissors, I went to work on the duct tape, hacking away at the back of his neck; where I was less likely to slash his skin.

When I'd cut it through I set the scissors on the counter and got a firm grip on one end of the tape with my right hand. “Sorry about this,” I said, and holding his head still with my left hand, I tore off the tape, bringing hair and tiny bits of skin with it.

He sucked in air hard and fast through his mouth, and blew it out again, over and over—like a boxer between rounds, too winded to talk, staring down at the floor.

“It's okay, Casey. It's okay now.” I stood right in front of him, one hand on each of his shoulders, and tried to calm him down. “You'll be fine now.”

He lifted his head and the fear was leaving his eyes. I knew he was trying to say thank-you, only the words wouldn't come out.

“Give it some time,” I said. “Don't try talking yet. You—”

His head jerked suddenly backward. “Waaash out,” he rasped, and a new, hopeless terror sprang up in his eyes.

Then a massive arm locked itself around my neck, squeezed tightly, and pulled the top half of my body backward, against the knee in the small of my back.

For the briefest of instants I may have blacked out—shock maybe—but then rage at my own stupidity snapped my mind alert. In my relief at getting Casey free, I'd absolutely forgotten what I was doing, where I was.

I struggled against being bent backward and clawed at the arm around my neck with my left hand, slamming my right elbow backward, trying to reach the man's gut, but accomplishing nothing. I instinctively reached out for the counter beside me for balance, and my hand landed right on the scissors. I grabbed and held them like a knife and slashed backward, hard, over and over, slicing at anything I could reach. When I finally found flesh, I drove the scissors deeper, twisting and yanking them side to side.

He screamed then, the man behind me, and let go of my neck. He pulled himself away and I lost my grip on the scissors. I turned and faced a man in a ski mask, standing six feet from me. I watched him reach down and pull the scissors out of the flesh of his inner thigh. Blood dripped from them, and he groaned when he saw it. Then he realized the weapon was in his hand now. He looked up at me and took a tiny step my way.

“Hold it,” I said, and I held the Beretta aimed at his chest. But the sight of the gun made no difference to him. With the scissors waving wildly back and forth in front of him, he took another step.

He kept coming at me … until I shot him.

CHAPTER
31

I
WAS BACK IN
control of myself, so it wasn't a killshot. It might not even have stopped him if it hadn't been for the bleeding gash in his thigh. But the slug caught him in his left shoulder and seemed to wake him up, as though he remembered again that he was losing blood, and now had two sources of steadily mounting pain. Whatever the reason, he dropped the scissors on the floor, slumped into one of the kitchen chairs, and stared up at me.

“Fuck you,” he said. “You're a walking dead man.” The very phrase Gus had quoted.

“Right,” I said, “and aren't we all. The difference is, Dominic, I'm still walking.”

“You just don't know,” he answered. His gaze kept flitting around the room, but try as he might, he couldn't keep it away from the open doorway to my right. “You just don't—”

“Quiet!” I whispered the order because I'd heard the sound, too. Someone had come in the front door of the apartment. Keeping the Beretta trained on Dominic, I stepped closer to the hallway and listened.

No one was coming down the hall. I leaned closer to the doorway, and then heard sounds from the front of the apartment—strange, gurgling, sloshing sounds, as though someone were emptying bottles of water onto the floor. Then the smell hit me. It wasn't water being poured out; it was gasoline.

“… the sink. Drawer under the sink.” Casey was talking, but I hadn't been hearing him. “Knife. Cut me loose.”

“There's no time,” I said. “We'll be burned.” Shoving the gun back in my pocket, I grabbed Casey from behind by his arms, and dragged him—chair and all—across the kitchen toward the porch door.

Dominic sat and watched, but lacked either the strength or the will to try to stop us. I got Casey over the door ledge onto the porch, and right to the top of the stairway. Then I realized I couldn't drag him down the stairs or he'd topple over on me.

“Cut me loose. Please cut me loose.” He kept saying that over and over, all the while twisting and wrestling around, panic-stricken at being unable to move his arms and legs.

There was no sign of a fire yet, so I left him backed up to the stairway and returned to the kitchen for a knife. “I'll be right back,” I said. “I promise.”

Dominic wasn't in the kitchen anymore.

I ran to the open doorway and peered down the dark hall. Dominic was limping badly, but was almost to the other end already. More importantly, there was another man, also wearing a ski mask, coming my way, sloshing gasoline from a huge red can as he came. The fumes were overpowering and a gunshot might have sent us all up and out through the roof.

I turned and ran to the sink and pulled open the drawer. There must have been five sharp-looking knives. I grabbed one and turned to see the man with the gas can burst into the kitchen. He came at me, lifting the can above his head. I swung the knife in a wide arc at his midsection, slicing through nothing but air. The gas can crashed down on the top of my head, and the world went away.

*   *   *

M
Y NEXT CONSCIOUS MOMENT
found me sliding around on my knees, looking desperately for the knife in the dark. Then I realized I was alone in the kitchen, with the light turned off and gasoline everywhere. Still no fire, but there were voices from far away, at the front of the apartment. I struggled to my feet and went to the back door. The wooden door was soaked with gasoline, and it was closed—closed and locked from the inside with a key, and the key wasn't there.

I ran across the kitchen into the hallway, then all the way to the front door. It was open and when I got there I looked down the carpeted front stairway. The stairs took a right angle turn halfway down. I saw no one, but the odor of gas on the stairs was sickening. I made it to the landing hallway down in two jumps and saw the man in the ski mask with his back to me in the door at the bottom of the stairs. When he turned his head around he looked up at me and I stared back, frozen for an instant as he tossed a burning torch of newspaper up onto the stairs.

I dove down the remaining steps even as the flames shot up toward me. I hit the bottom rolling and kept on going, out onto the front porch, down the steps, and into the snow. By the time I got to my feet the front entranceway of the two-flat was ablaze and flames were already showing through the second-floor windows.

I swung around, looking for Dominic and Steve—because the second man was Steve, for sure. They were halfway down the block, just getting into a car, the car Tina had driven. I ran that way, driven by instinct rather than sense, as though I could catch them or get their license plate number, as though that made some difference. Stupidly, I chased the departing car almost to the corner, but they were long gone and I turned back to the two-flat. The wail of fire sirens rose up in the distance. And only then did I remember.

Casey, for God's sake. Casey.

One of the second floor windows exploded above me and flames shot out, as I pounded clumsily through the snow, across the front yard and into the gangway. By the time I got to the back of the building I could hear fire crackling on the upper part of the enclosed wooden porch. Steve must have spread gasoline out there, too, before he locked me in, and the fire had either burned through the kitchen door already, or gone up and through the broken window.

I went through the door into the enclosure and made it up the steps as far as the first-floor apartment. Beyond that it was hopeless. The dry, aged wood made perfect kindling. Pieces of the roof were dropping down around me. I turned and went back down the steps and into the backyard. There was nothing left to do.

Fire engines were arriving out front from the south. I went into the alley and headed north, forcing myself not to run.

*   *   *

I
WANDERED AROUND FOR
a while, telling myself I was looking for Casey, telling myself he must have gotten out somehow and might be freezing in the snow. And not really believing it. I don't know why I wasn't picked up by the cops, except there were other people on the street now, drawn by the fire and the excitement.

I lost track of where I was, but eventually found myself on the corner diagonally across the intersection from Steve Connolly's house. This was as close as I could safely get, mixed into a softly talking group of men and women, some carrying children on their shoulders, many with pajamas visible beneath their winter coats. It was a crowd that was constantly changing—some people getting cold, or bored, and turning away, but always replaced by others who arrived with the same excited curiosity about what was going on at the pervert's house. I tried to stay within the crowd, and still not engage in any conversation.

It was past three
A.M
. now, the temperature somewhere in the high twenties and a dark, starless sky threatening snow. But the block in front of me, Lammy's block, was awash in the cold, eerie glow of floodlights, punctuated by competing emergency lights—blue-and-white police strobes flashing frantically against the slower, perhaps more patient, red-and-white bursts from fire department vehicles. A helicopter hovered low in the windless sky, the beam of its spotlight striped and dancing as it pierced through shifting clouds of rising vapor—vehicle exhaust mingled with white smoke and steam from a dying fire.

Lammy's block swarmed with people bustling this way and that in apparent chaos, calling and shouting orders in voices barely audible in the cold night air above the rumbling running engines of more than a dozen fire and police vehicles. Two hook and ladders and a snorkel rig, its long arm folded in upon itself, were clustered closest to the center of the block. Nearby, two huge, boxlike red equipment trucks faced each other, nose to nose, banks of portable floodlights mounted on their roofs. There was a red fire-lieutenant's car and a trauma wagon, with its wide-open rear doors showing activity of some sort within.

Threaded in among the fire equipment were police vehicles of every variety: marked and unmarked squads, patrol wagons, an evidence technician's car, and another large rectangular truck like the fire department's equipment trucks, except this one blue and white, but again with floodlights mounted on its top. Two TV vans were parked just outside the police lines, tall towers rising from their roofs. Even the Red Cross truck was there, with coffee and doughnuts for participants with the proper credentials.

In among the jumble of motor vehicles, helmeted firefighters in knee-length coats of black and reflective yellow climbed carefully in heavy boots over hoses and snow-banked curbs. Uniformed police officers of both sexes in bulky black jackets and fur-lined, ear-flapped hats stood silently—almost casually—at my end of the block, and certainly at the other end as well. Their mere presence was intended, and sufficient, to keep the curious neighbors at bay. Beyond them, in the inner circle, detectives in topcoats and fedoras, and aggressive wool-capped tactical officers in their trademark flak jackets, stood in clusters with their white cardboard cups of coffee, chatting and laughing and shaking their heads, occasionally stamping their feet on the frozen ground … and constantly looking around.

Constantly looking around. Pivoting this way and that. Peering at the shifting groups of onlookers around the edges of the scene. Bantering, watching. Gossiping, observing.

I'm told that as hard as any crowd watches any fire, smart cops—especially when they know it's a torch job—watch the crowd right back. Equal opportunity crime notwithstanding, the cops are looking mostly for males, and specifically for some guy shifting his weight rhythmically from foot to foot, or—better yet—a guy with his hand at his crotch. They're looking for the man showing more than ordinary curiosity, the one for whom fire offers a special excitement, a singular, sexual, thrill. The perpetrator—pro and amateur alike, I'm told—is often there on the scene, and quite often ejaculating into his pants.

I wasn't excited in quite that way, but because the smart cops were watching I had to get out of there. I could see that the fire was under control, essentially out. The homes on either side of Lammy's were both still standing, their fronts and sides coated with thick, roped armors of ice. There were no visible flames, and not even much smoke anymore, although firefighters still shot heavy streams of water into what was left of the two-flat, basically the exterior brick walls about as high as the first floor, with the roof, the upper walls, and everything else nothing but a mass of smoldering, steaming ruins that had fallen in on itself.

Lammy wouldn't have to worry about going home anymore. Maybe he'd be better off. Maybe it was all for the best—for Lammy.