One-Eyed Jack (28 page)

“
She doesn’t owe you a
favor? Seemed like when I talked to her before she was pretty
determined not to let anything bad happen to you.”

I resented the way he said that. “She
doesn’t owe me anything,” I protested. “We’re just
friends.”

“
She seemed awful
protective of you.”

“
She
doesn’t
have
a lot of friends.”

“
What about those
congressmen?”

“
They’re
not exactly
friends
,” I said. “More like
clients.” I didn’t really want to explain how Mel earned a living;
Skees might not have jurisdiction in Maryland, but he still wasn’t
likely to look kindly on what amounted to extortion.

“
Clients?”

I suddenly realized what
that must sound like. “Not like
that
,” I said.

Mel had actually thought about
becoming a dominatrix once, or at least she’d talked about it, but
she didn’t have any idea how to go about it. Besides, it seemed
likely most potential customers were more interested in feeling
obedient than terrified, and she just plain didn’t want to. It
wasn’t her idea of fun.

As for any other sort of prostitution,
call girls’ clients aren’t looking to be scared. They’re more
likely to be doing the scaring.

“
All right, whatever,”
Skees said. “Do you think you could invite her out here to give
Jenny a little talk?”

“
It’s a long drive,” I
said.

That startled him. “Drive? I figured
she’d fly, same as you did.”

I closed my eyes.
“Detective,” I said, “she doesn’t fly. You’ve talked to her. You
know the effect she has over the phone; it isn’t very different in
person, and she can’t turn it off. You really want
that
sealed in a plane
with a hundred strangers for a couple of hours?”

“
Oh,” he said, blinking.
“I guess not.”

I didn’t mention that
Mel
had
tried it
once, just once, after Mrs. Reinholt cursed her. She hadn’t
actually gotten as far as the plane. The security line had been on
the verge of screaming panic, children on all sides had been
crying, and travelers who didn’t like flying had been canceling
their trips or just turning around and going home, when she reached
the first TSA agent. The guard first tried to pull her aside, and
then broke down crying.

Mel decided that enough was enough,
and that starting a panic in mid-flight was likely to get a lot of
people killed. She cashed in her ticket and left.

“
Listen, Detective,” I
said. “I know you don’t want any other kids to get hurt, and
neither do I, but I really don’t think there’s much we can do about
it. These night-things are out there, and they always have been.
They’re just part of the world. If they could go on wild rampages,
slaughtering dozens of people, I think we’d have heard about it. I
figure they do kill people occasionally, people like Audrey
Reinholt and Andrew McPhee, but that it’s rare, and it’s
unavoidable, like being struck by lightning or eaten by sharks. I
don’t think we can stop it. I’ll call Mel if you want, but I don’t
think it’ll do any good. And I’ll answer your questions, but I
don’t think I can help, either. I just want to go home. I’ve done
my part here.”

“
Have you? But Jenny’s
still out there.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Detective,
but Jenny’s not my problem. If I thought I could do something to
stop her, I would, but I can’t. I’m not doing any good here, and I
need to go home.”

Maybe that sounds heartless, but
really, what could I do? If I stayed, I wouldn’t be able to do any
good, and if Jenny did kill more kids, I’d practically have my nose
rubbed in it. I’d have to sit there and listen to her gloat about
how much she had loved those kids, and how they’d loved her. Maybe
running away wasn’t the most admirable option, but it seemed like
the most realistic. I was going to be haunted by my memories of
Andrew McPhee’s blood soaking Jack and Jenny as it was; I didn’t
need to add any other kids’ blood to my nightmares.

I wanted to help, really I did, but I
couldn’t. If I stayed I’d just be giving Detective Skees false
hope; he’d think I was his wedge, his key into the spirit world,
when all I was was a peephole.

“
But
you
dreamed
about this,” Skees said. “Isn’t there a
reason
for that? Doesn’t that make
it your problem?”

I shook my head. “I
dreamed about
Jack
,” I said. “Not about Jenny eating other kids. And my dreams
have always been about someone that’s going to change
my
life, not about
things that happen to other people.”

“
So has Jack Wilson
changed your life?”

That question stopped me for a
second.

“
I don’t
know,” I said. “Not yet. Not really. He got me here, but that’s not
it – I didn’t dream about
you
.” That maybe wasn’t entirely
true, since Skees had been in a couple of my dreams, but I thought
it was close enough. The dreams hadn’t been
about
him, they’d been about
Jack.

“
Then stick around, and
give us a hand, and I’ll arrange for you to talk to Jack again.
Alone, if necessary. Maybe you can figure out why you were dreaming
about him.”

I was tempted, but I shook my head.
“I’m probably going to get fired as it is. I can’t afford to stay
much longer; the hotel and car would eat my savings.”

“
Money’s the
problem?”

“
Well, yeah.”

He frowned. “I can probably pry loose
some discretionary money – maybe not a full consultant’s fee, but I
think I can call you a confidential informant.”

That hadn’t occurred to me.
“Seriously?” I asked.

“
Not a lot. Maybe a couple
of hundred.”

“
That’d help,” I conceded.
“And if you’re serious about keeping me around, maybe you could
talk to my boss – we’d need to be careful about that, I told him
this was a family emergency.”

I don’t know why I was agreeing; even
as I said it, I knew I couldn’t do any good, and that my presence
would just be a distraction.

“
It
is
a family emergency, even if it’s not
your
family.”

“
Well, yeah...”

“
Call your friend Mel, if
it’s not too late...”

“
It’s not,” I said,
interrupting.

“
Good. Ask her if she’ll
make the drive. Then we’ll visit the hospital and see if we can
find Jenny and check out what she’s up to, and tomorrow you can
have a talk with Jack Wilson, and maybe figure out why you dreamed
about him.”

“
And the
money?”

“
I’ll see what I can
do.”

I considered that for a moment. I
looked Skees in the eye, and while I couldn’t read much there, he
seemed sincere.

“
All right,” I said. “Give
me a phone.”

Chapter Nineteen

By the time I had brought Mel up to
speed and asked her if she’d like to come to Lexington to try to
scare away a ghost, it was almost midnight. By the time I had
gotten over my shaking and convinced Skees that “I’ll think about
it” was the best answer we were going to get, it was well after. I
thought that meant the hospital visit would wait, but Skees said
no.

“
You can’t see ghosts by
daylight, can you?”

“
No,” I
admitted.

“
Then we go now. I’m not
waiting until tomorrow night.”

I was too exhausted to argue. I caught
a very short nap in the car on the way over, but it was only a few
blocks from the police station to the hospital garage on South
Limestone, and there wasn’t any traffic at that hour to slow us
up.

Skees talked us past the front desk,
past hospital security, and past the two cops still guarding the
possible crime scene, and got us to the late Andrew McPhee’s
room.

I hadn’t been in there before; other
people had gotten there first when the screaming started, and
hadn’t let me through the door. I looked around.

It was a normal hospital room, pretty
much – a single. The last time I stayed in a hospital I was in a
semi-private room, which meant I shared it with an old man with a
tube in his throat, and I’d thought that was still the standard,
but this room only had one bed, and more fancy equipment than mine
had. It smelled of disinfectant, the bed was stripped, and the
floor had obviously been scrubbed recently, but other than that,
there wasn’t any sign that a kid had been horribly murdered there a
few hours earlier.

Jenny wasn’t in the room. I told Skees
as much.

“
You’re sure?” he
asked.

“
Detective, it’s not exactly hard to tell. She’s a grown
woman, or at least she looks like one, and to me she’s just as
visible at this hour as
you
are. If she were in here, I’d see
her.”

“
She couldn’t
hide?”

“
Maybe
she
could
,
but why would she?”

He didn’t have an answer, and I
continued, “The last place I saw her wasn’t in here, anyway. It was
that staff lounge, or whatever it is, where Jack and I were
held.”

“
Show me.”

I showed him. Jenny wasn’t there,
either.

“
Now what?” I
asked.

“
We look around a little,”
the detective said.

So we walked up and down a few
corridors, and I didn’t see Jenny, but eventually I did see
something vaguely humanoid, crouching in a corner.

It definitely wasn’t Jenny; it was
grayish-brown and indistinct, as if I was seeing it from the corner
of my eye even when I stared directly at it, and it didn’t look
female. It held something shiny and knifelike. I didn’t remember
seeing it there before, but that didn’t mean anything.

Ordinarily I ignored the night-things
as best I could, but we wanted to find Jenny, and this one might
have seen her. I decided to try something. I gestured for Skees to
wait, and then I walked toward it, trying to look as if I couldn’t
see it.

It raised its head as I approached; it
didn’t have much of a face, just darker patches where eyes should
have been, and a hole for a mouth. That was disconcerting, but it
could have been worse. I was relieved to not see fangs or
teeth.

Of course, it did have
that knife. If it
was
a knife; it was blurry, just a streak of silvery light maybe
a foot long, that the thing was holding clutched in its right hand,
as if the light reflecting from a knife-blade was there, but the
blade itself wasn’t.

For all I know, that’s exactly what it
was. Maybe it was a memory of a knife, or a belief in a knife.
After all, if ghost-Jenny could turn herself into a lonely mother’s
guilty fantasy, why couldn’t this thing carry the memory of a
knife?

“
I see you,” I said,
stopping and looking directly at it.

The thing froze.

“
I know you’re there. I
can see you.”

It stared at me with those dark spots
that weren’t eyes, but it didn’t say anything.

It didn’t attack me, either, which was
good.

None of the monsters and night-things
I saw had seriously tried to hurt me since high school, but I still
worried about it sometimes. Most of them seemed harmless, but I
could never be sure; after all, the thing that got Mrs. Reinholt
hadn’t looked all that very different from some of the ones I still
saw regularly.

And some did try to scare me. Some of
them succeeded, too.

This one didn’t try anything. It just
squatted there in the hospital corridor, looking at me.

“
I’m looking for Jenny,” I
said. “The ghost woman who ate that kid earlier.”

Something shifted slightly in its
rudimentary face.

“
You know who I’m talking
about,” I said, hoping I was right. “I don’t know whether you can
talk, but you can point, can’t you?”

It was still just looking at me, and I
still couldn’t see eyes or a mouth, but it felt as if I could read
something in its expression, and what I read was more or less, “Why
should I tell you?”

“
If you
tell me something I can do for you in exchange, something harmless,
I’ll do it,” I said. “And I’ll leave you alone. I don’t know who
you are, or
what
you are, or what you want, but I can probably
find some way to make your existence less pleasant if I have
to.”

It considered that, then raised the
knife and pointed down a corridor – not the one we were in, but
another branch, off to the right.