That train of thought, however, was derailed by the word logic. The events of the past couple hours had thrown baby Logic out the window with the bathwater of reason. Nothing happening to them this night would have been possible in the rational world where Jilly had grown up from choirgirl to comedian. This was a new world, either with an entirely new logic that she hadn't puzzled out yet or with no logic at all, and in such a world, anything could happen to Dylan in a strange house, in the dark.
Jilly didn't like knives. She had become a comedian, not part of a knife-throwing act. She desperately didn't want to go into a house with a knife collection and a Kenny.
Two minutes ago, when Jilly had entered the kitchen and had hung up the telephone one digit short of disaster, poor Marj seemed dazed, numb. Now the candy-striped semizombie was rapidly transforming into an emotionally distraught grandmother capable of reckless action. 'We gotta get Travis!'
The last thing Jilly needed was a knife in her chest, but the next-to-last thing she needed was a hysterical grandmother barging back into the house, complicating Dylan's situation, most likely going for the phone again the moment she caught sight of it and was reminded that the police were always waiting to serve.
'You stay here, Marj. You stay right here. This is my job. I'll find Travis. I'll get him out of there.'
As Jilly turned away, having committed to being braver than she preferred to be, Marj grabbed her by the arm. 'Who are you people?'
You people. Jilly almost reacted to those two innocent words, you people, rather than to the question. She almost said, What do you mean – YOU PEOPLE? You have a problem with people like me?
During the past couple years, however, as she had gained some acceptance with her act and had achieved at least a small measure of success, her hot-tempered knee-jerk reactions to perceived insults had seemed increasingly stupid. Even in response to Dylan – who for some reason had the power to push her go-nuts button as no one before him – even in response to him, the knee-jerk reactions were stupid. And under current circumstances, they were dangerously distracting, as well.
'Police,' she lied with surprising ease for a former choirgirl. 'We're police.'
'No uniforms?' Marj wondered.
'We're undercover.' She didn't offer to produce a badge. 'Stay here, sweetie. Stay here where it's safe. Let the pros handle this.'
* * *
The boy in the FDNY T-shirt had been overpowered, beaten, and most likely knocked unconscious, although he had revived by the time Dylan entered his room. One blackened and swollen eye. Abraded chin. Blood caked in his left ear from a blow to the side of the head.
Pulling strips of adhesive tape off the kid's face, prying a red rubber ball from the pale-lipped mouth, Dylan vividly recalled being helpless in the motel-room chair, remembered gagging on the athletic sock, and he discovered in himself a settled anger like long-banked coals ready to flare white-hot when fanned by one breath of righteous outrage. This potentially volcanic anger seemed out of character for an easygoing man who believed that even the most savage heart could be brought out of darkness by the recognition of the deeply beautiful design of the natural world, of life. For years he'd turned the other cheek so often that at times he must have looked like a spectator at a perpetual tennis match.
His anger wasn't fueled by what he had suffered, however, nor even by what he might yet have to endure as his stuff-driven fate played out in days to come, but by sympathy for the boy and by pity for all victims in this age of violence. After Judgment, perhaps the meek would inherit the earth for their playing field, as promised; but meanwhile, the vicious had their sport, day after bloody day.
Dylan had always been aware of injustice in the world, but he'd never cared as intensely as this, had never before felt the twisting auger of injustice boring through his heart. The poignancy and purity of his anger surprised him, for it seemed greatly out of proportion to the apparent cause. One battered boy was not Auschwitz, not the mass graves of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, not the World Trade Center.
Something profound was happening to him, all right, but the transfiguration wasn't limited to the acquisition of a sixth sense. Deeper and more fearsome changes were occurring, tectonic shifts in the deepest bedrock of his mind.
Gag removed, free to speak, the boy proved self-controlled and capable of getting at once to the quick of the situation. Whispering, his gaze fixed on the open door as if it were a portal through which the most hideous troops in Hell's army might march at any moment, he said, 'Kenny's wired at least six ways. Full-on psycho. Got a girl in Grandma's room, I think he'll kill her. Then Grandma. Then me. He'll kill me last 'cause he hates me most.'
'What girl?' Dylan asked.
'Becky. Lives down the street.'
'Little girl?'
'No, seventeen.'
The chain that wrapped the boy's ankles and bound them together had been secured with a padlock. The links between the two bracelets of his handcuffs had been passed behind one of the vertical rails on the brass headboard, tethering him to the bed.
'Keys?' Dylan asked.
'Kenny's got 'em.' At last the boy's gaze shifted from the open door, and he met Dylan's eyes. 'I'm stuck here.'
Lives were in the balance now. Although bringing in the cops would almost certainly draw the black-Suburban crowd, as well, with mortal consequences for Dylan and Shep and Jilly, he was morally compelled to call 911.
'Phone?' he whispered.
'Kitchen,' breathed the boy. 'And one in Grandma's room.'
Intuition told Dylan that he didn't have time to go to the kitchen to make the call. Besides, he didn't want to leave the boy up here alone. As far as he knew, premonition was not a part of his psychic gift, but the air cloyed about him, thickening with the expectation of violence; he would have wagered his soul that if the killing had not already begun, it would start before he reached the bottom of the rose-festooned stairs.
Grandma's room had a phone, but evidently it also had Kenny. When Dylan went in there, he would need more than a steady finger for the touch-tone keypad.
Once more the blades on the walls drew his attention, but he was repulsed by the prospect of slashing anyone with sword or machete. He didn't have the stomach for such wet work.
Aware of Dylan's renewed interest in the knives, and evidently sensing his disinclination to use one, the boy said, 'There. By the bookcase.'
A baseball bat. One of the old-fashioned hardwood kind. Dylan had swung a lot of them in his childhood, although never at a human being.
Any soldier or cop, or any man of action, might have disagreed with him, but Dylan preferred the baseball bat to a bayonet. It felt good in his hands.
'Full-on psycho,' the boy reminded him, as if to say that the bat should be swung first, with no resort to reason or persuasion.
To the threshold. The hall. Across the hall to the only second-floor room that he'd not yet investigated.
This final door, closed tight, wasn't outlined by even a thin filament of light.
A hush fell over the house. Ear to the jamb, Dylan listened for a telltale sound from six-way-wired Kenny.
* * *
Some performers eventually confused make-believe with truth, and to a degree grew into their invented personas, swaggering through the real world as though they were always on a stage. Over the past few years, Jilly had half convinced herself that she was the ass-kicking Southwest Amazon whom she claimed to be when she appeared before an audience.
Returning to the kitchen, she discovered much to her dismay that in a crunch, image and reality were not, in her case, the same thing. As she searched quickly for a weapon, drawer to drawer, cupboard to cupboard, the bones in her legs jellified, while her heart hardened into a sledge that hammered against her ribs.
By any standard of law or combat, a butcher knife qualified as a weapon. But the nearly arthritic stiffness with which her right hand closed on the handle convinced her that she'd never be comfortable wielding it on anything more responsive than a chuck roast.
Besides, to use a knife, you had to get in close to your enemy. Assuming that she might have to thump Kenny enough to stop him, if not actually waste him, Jilly preferred to thump him from as great a distance as possible, preferably with a high-powered rifle from a neighboring rooftop.
The pantry was just a pantry, not also an armory. The heaviest weaponry on its shelves were cans of cling peaches in heavy syrup.
Then Jilly noticed that Marj apparently had been plagued by an ant problem, and with a flash of inspiration, she said, 'Ah.'
* * *
Neither the baseball bat nor his righteous anger made Dylan sufficiently brave or sufficiently foolish to crash into a dark room in search of a dope-crazed, hormone-crazed, just-plain-crazed teenager with more types of edge weapons than Death himself could name. After easing the door open – and feeling the tingle of psychic spoor – he waited in the hallway, his back to the wall, listening.
He heard enough nothing to suggest that he might be adrift in the vacuum of deep space, and as he began to wonder if he had gone deaf, he decided that Kenny must be no less patient than he was full-on psychotic.
Although Dylan wanted to do this about as much as he wanted to wrestle a crocodile, he edged into the open doorway, reached around the casing into the room, and felt the wall for the light switch. He assumed that Kenny stood poised to respond to such a maneuver, and his expectations of having his hand pinned to the wall with a knife were so high that he was not far short of astonished when he still had all his fingers after flipping the switch.
Grandma's room didn't have a ceiling fixture, but one of two night-stand lamps came on: a ginger jar painted with tulips, crowned by a pleated yellow shade in the shape of a coolie hat. Soft light and soft shadows shared the space.
Two other doors served the room. Both were closed. One most likely led to a closet. A bathroom might lie behind the other.
The drapes at the three windows were neither long enough nor full enough to conceal anyone.
A freestanding, full-length, oval-shaped mirror occupied one corner. No one lurked behind it, but Dylan's reflection occupied its face, looking less frightened than he felt, bigger than he thought of himself.
The queen-size bed was positioned so that Kenny might be hiding on the far side, lying on the floor, but no other furniture offered concealment.
Of more immediate concern was the figure on the bed. A thin chenille spread, a blanket, and a top sheet were tossed in disarray, but someone appeared to be lying under them, concealed head to foot.
As in countless prison-escape movies, this might actually have been pillows arranged to mimic the human form, except that the bedclothes trembled slightly.
By opening the door and switching on the light, Dylan already had announced his presence. Cautiously approaching the bed, he said, 'Kenny?'
Under the tumbled bedding, the ill-defined figure stopped shaking. For a moment it froze and lay as still as any cadaver beneath a morgue sheet.
Dylan gripped the baseball bat with both hands, ready to swing for the fences. 'Kenny?'
The hidden form began to twitch, as though with uncontainable excitement, with nervous energy.
The door that might lead to a closet: still closed. The door that might lead to a bathroom: still closed.
Dylan glanced over his shoulder, toward the hall door.
Nothing.
He grappled for the name that the shackled boy mentioned, the name of the threatened girl from down the street, and then he had it: 'Becky?'
The mysterious figure twitched, twitched, so alive beneath the covers, but it did not reply.
Although he dared not club what he could not see, Dylan was loath to put his hand to the bedclothes to toss them aside, for the same reason that he would have been reluctant to pull back the tarp on a woodpile if he suspected that a rattlesnake coiled among the cords.
He also wasn't eager to use the fat end of the baseball bat to lift the bedclothes out of the way. While entangled with the covers, the bat would be an ineffective weapon, and although this maneuver would leave Dylan vulnerable for only the briefest moment, a moment would be all that Kenny needed if he shot off the bed and out from under the rising covers, armed with a specialty knife well designed for evisceration.
Soft light, soft shadows.
House hushed.
The shape, twitching.
17
Jilly in the downstairs hall, archway to archway, past three lightless rooms, listened at each threshold, detected nothing, and moved onward to the foyer, past the lamp table, to the foot of the stairs.
Starting to climb, she heard a metallic plink behind her, and halted on the second step. Plink was followed by tat-a-tat and by a quick strumming – zzziiinnnggg – and then by utter stillness.
The noises had seemed to come from the first room inside the front door, directly opposite the foyer. Probably the living room.
When you were trying to avoid a run-in with a young man whose own grandmother's best assessment of him boiled down to crazy-drugs-knives, you didn't want to hear peculiar metallic sounds coming out of a dark room at your back. The subsequent silence did not have – could never possibly have – the innocent quality of the silence that had preceded plink.
With the unknown ahead, but now also behind her, Jilly did not suddenly discover the elusive inner Amazon, but she didn't freeze or cringe in fear, either. Her stoic mother and a few bad breaks long ago had taught her that adversity must be faced forthrightly, without equivocation; Mom counseled that you must tell yourself that every misfortune was custard, that it was cake and pie, and you must eat it up and be done with it. If grinning Kenny lurked in the pitch-black living room, stropping knives against each other loud enough to be confident that she would hear him, Jilly had an entire picnic of trouble laid out for her.
She retreated from the stairs into the foyer once more.
Plink, plink. Tick-tick-tick. Zing... zzziiinnnggg!
* * *
Short of inhaling a gale like the big bad wolf in the fairy tale and blowing the covers off the bed, Dylan either had to stand here waiting for the shrouded figure to make the first move, which invited disaster more certainly than did taking action, or he must unveil the twitching form to learn its name and intentions.
Holding the baseball bat upraised in his right hand, he seized the bedclothes with his free hand and whipped them aside, revealing a black-haired, blue-eyed, barefoot teenage girl in cut-off jeans and a sleeveless blue-checkered blouse.
'Becky?'
Fright possessed her face, her electroshock-wide eyes. Tremors of fear flowed through her in plentiful rillets that repeatedly backed up into an overspilling twitch, jerking her head, her entire body, with the force he'd seen translated through the covers.