Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (17 page)

Then Jack was speaking once more, this time directly to Artie, and a moment later she realized that Artie was gone and it was just her and Jack now. She stood up, pulled her robe tight around herself again, and walked to him. Jack rose from the bed to greet her, but they both hesitated awkwardly.

“Thank you for that,” she said.

“I’m sorry about everything,” he said. “You know I am. I just . . . I promised him.”

Molly narrowed her eyes and was surprised at the bitterness she felt still within her.

“He’s dead, Jack. You have a responsibility to me, not to him,” she said. “You’re about the best friend I have. I love you. But I’m going to be angry for a while still, and you’re just going to have to deal with that. Now I’m going to take a shower and you’re going to Newburyport. Let me know if you learn anything.” With that, she turned and walked from the room, leaving a mightily chagrined Jack to stand there and watch her go.

The smell of garlic was strong inside Concetta’s Trattoria, a tiny restaurant whose atmosphere and decor was so quaintly Italian that it might have been a film set rather than an actual place of business.
Too self-aware,
Dallas thought.
That’s what it is. They went to the best spots in the North End and recreated it here. It’s not a real restaurant. It’s Epcot.

On the crackling sound system, Frank Sinatra sang “The Best Is Yet to Come.” The dining room was dark, shuttered off from the outside world so that even at high noon they could light the candles in the precious red glass votives to get the desired effect. The air conditioner hummed softly. The walls were adorned with maps and drawings of Rome and Venice and shelves outside the swinging kitchen doors were stocked with salamis and enormous slabs of cheese, fat jars filled with peppers. Yet those nods to the working-class Italian restaurant were belied by the crisp white tablecloths and the starched, effete waiters.

This was Wellesley, after all. The city stank of money, and the faux-perfect Italian restaurant only lent itself to that stench. Dallas was certain that the food would be exquisite. In a city like this, with a clientele that could afford the prices on the menu, it had to be. But all of it just pissed him off.

“Did you decide what you wanted?”

He looked across the table at Valerie and she smiled.

“Never have been able to,” she replied playfully, and yet there was a gravity to her gaze that touched him. “That’s the trouble with all of us thinking creatures, isn’t it? Caesar or House? Veal or chicken? Privacy or company?” Dallas smiled thinly. “Funny.”

Valerie was dressed in a wardrobe from Nine West and Lord & Taylor, blending into the culture of these wealthy communities as though she were born to it, as though she were human. It was not merely a skill she had learned over decades, even centuries, just as Dallas had. It was also a talent. She had the flair for it. And yet there were moments, like now, when instead of fitting in, she seemed so very lost.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” she said softly. Then she stared at the menu and spoke to him again without looking up. “What about you, Dallas? Have you decided what you want, what you’re hunting for?”

He gazed at her. “Isn’t there value in the hunt itself ?”

For a long while she said nothing, merely perused the menu. As he watched her, words from out of time floated into his mind, the final thing she said to him before their last split.

“
You give all your intimacy to the prey,”
she said. Even then he had known she was right, but could never manage to work out what was so wrong with that. Those thoughts led him to his worry for his daughter, and the emotion surprised him, as it always did, for it was a very recent development. When her mother died and she set off into the human world, trying to find human music within herself, playing her guitar in roadhouses and dive bars she was too young to drink in, he had barely thought of her at all.

Now, though, to know she was lost . . . Perhaps there were other things worth hunting than prey.

Dallas watched Valerie closely. Sometimes he wondered why he never stayed with her for very long. Other times he wondered why she ever took him back.

“You look beautiful,” he told her.

A reluctant smile appeared upon her face. “Not so bad yourself.”

Yet already his mind had gone back to the prey. The quickly healing wound in his shoulder seeped blood into the white shirt under his black jacket. A ferocious darkness coiled inside him, not merely angry but driven to rage by the bloodlust that had gone unquenched the night before, the mission that had gone unfulfilled.

She saw it in him, as she always had.

“Hey,” Valerie said softly. “You’ll find a way.”

A waiter arrived at the table and filled their water glasses from a pitcher filled with clinking ice cubes. He sped off a moment later as though he had other glasses to fill, but there was no one else in the place. The maître d’ and the bartender and a trio of waiters were the only other people there. It was just coming up on noon on a weekday, too early for most people to have lunch apparently, and Dallas figured that a place like this did most of their business at dinner anyway.

He stared at the menu and grumbled inwardly at the errors in the translations from Italian to English.

“What did Jasmine say?”

Even as Valerie asked the question, Dallas tensed. He could feel the weight of the cellular phone hanging in the inner pocket of his suit. His nostrils flared and his upper lip curled as he glared up at his lover.

“I haven’t called her yet.”

Valerie’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I just . . . wanted to cheer you up.”

He grunted, and it was almost a laugh. “You’re doing a hell of a job.”

Her hand slipped across the table and closed upon his. Dallas let the menu slip to the table and paused a moment before reaching up to hold her hand in both of his.

“I know,” he said reluctantly. He gazed at her, this beautiful-creature that he was never quite fair to. “Just ignore me, all right. I’m more than a little ticked off about my shoulder, but mostly I’m just angry with myself. Only twice before have I missed the mark the first time out, but this is different. The job is for one of us. This is exactly why I don’t work for our kind. How will it look when word gets around?”

“And that’s why you haven’t told her,” Valerie said, nodding in understanding. She offered him a too-bright, supportive smile. “Well, why should you? You can take care of this and she’ll never even know.”

Dallas took a long breath and let it out. He stared at the red glow of the candle flickering in its glass. It was true, things weren’t as bad as all that, but that did not prevent him from feeling as though he had failed. It would be so much easier if he were willing to kill Bill Cantwell, but he did not want to have to explain that to Valerie or, more importantly, to Jasmine. Reluctantly, he realized that it might have to come to that.

Cantwell might have to die.

In the end, he had to decide what was more important, his reputation or his honor.

Thinking about it hurt his head and made the sting of the shoulder wound all the more acute. Dallas winced and stretched out his left arm, feeling the stiffness begin to relax. The wound was healing, but it would take a few days before he was completely recovered.

“Do you need more time, or would you like to order now?”

The waiter had suddenly appeared and he hovered over them now, a short, middle-aged Italian man with a mustache he had probably been instructed to grow. In his crisp white shirt and black tie, he regarded them with an air of disdain, as though they had inconvenienced him with their patronage.

Dallas felt the buzz of a low growl in his throat but it was not loud enough for the waiter to hear.

He forced a false grin onto his face. “You know what? We need another minute.”

The waiter sniffed. “I’ll come back in a few moments with some bread.”

When they were alone again, Valerie looked at him with what might have been excitement or anxiety. “Oh, baby, what can we do to make you feel better?”

Dallas grinned again, but this time it was for real. His life, his profession, was all about order, but in that moment he wanted more than anything to do something for Valerie. And the greatest gift he could give her was chaos.

“Why don’t you lock the door?”

C H A P T E R 9

Jack had been to Newburyport only once before, so it took him several minutes to locate the right street even though Molly gave him directions. She and Artie had often visited the quaint old seaside town, whose well-groomed streets were lined with eighteenth and nineteenth century homes. It was the kind of place that would eventually—probably soon enough—be totally overrun by young executives whose presence would drive the real estate values through the roof. Already it was far from cheap. But it was still the sort of place that felt like a real town, where people knew their neighbors, called the postman and the librarian by name.

As Jack drove through Newburyport, he felt a tug of yearning in him. He could not imagine a time when he would not be helping to run Bridget’s, but a town like this—the old homes, the little restaurants, the parks—it all appealed to him.

Molly had not been able to remember the name of the street but just from her description Jack had vaguely remembered it, so that when he passed it suddenly on his left he recognized it immediately and turned around. The road was lined with cars parked on either side and had more traffic crawling along it than any other spot in town. It sloped down on a gentle curve he knew would eventually lead to a restaurant that sat on a wharf and looked out upon the ocean. There were bars and boutiques and bookstores crammed along both sides of the road, tiny little shops that seemed to be squeezed in too tight on each block. Jack spotted an ice-cream store he remembered as he drove down the street, though many of the storefronts were invisible behind the crush of humanity that strolled up and down the sidewalk.

Jack was grateful that the traffic moved so slowly on that road. He had to bend over the steering wheel slightly to glance at the buildings that passed by on the passenger side. There was supposed to be a small sign that hung out from the side of the building, but if Molly had not told him to be on the lookout for it, he would have driven right by Madame Stefania’s Psychic Studio.

The sidewalk was crowded with ghosts.

Jack hit the brake so quickly that the driver of the car behind him lay on the horn. The windows of the Jeep were rolled all the way down and he heard the man cursing him loudly, but barely registered the words.

There were dozens of them, milling about on the cracked pale concrete sidewalk. Some sat on the three brick steps in front of the door that led to Madame Stefania’s second-floor offices. These phantoms were an odd array of individuals, men and women of varying ages and races, and children as well, many of them clad in styles that were years, even decades out of fashion.

Window shoppers and tourists passed right through them. Young couples with small children and tribes of teenagers merged on the sidewalk with people in business suits and a stunning trio of fashionably attired twenty something women who would have drawn a long stare from Jack on any other day. Today he barely glanced at them.

He found a parking space a block up and walked back toward the cluster of ghosts in a sort of daze, bumping people without realizing it, mumbling barely formed apologies. As he moved closer, he half-expected the ghosts to turn and look at him, to
see
him, but they did not.

Many of them, perhaps even most of them, had faraway looks in their eyes and a sort of lost, empty cast to their features that Jack had seen on spirits before. But not like this, never in these numbers. He stared at them, fascinated and saddened at the same time. The ones who appeared to be less than sane were difficult enough to see, but the others were somehow worse. Even in life, he had rarely seen such anguish on human faces. Each appeared lonelier and more pitiful than the last, and yet they were all together.

Together.

And then it struck him, something that had been unnerving him without him even recognizing it at first.

They were all together, and yet none of them spoke to the others, even looked at each other, as if each of those sad, lost souls were unaware of the others. The children were the most difficult to see, gazing up at the windows of the second floor with despair on their faces, and yet none of the other ghosts tried to comfort them.

Jack stood among them, there in front of Madame Stefania’s, and he knew he had to try to reach out to them. He cast a self-conscious glance around, and then he closed his eyes and tried to see them. His stomach did a queasy little flip, he opened his eyes, and the world shifted around him, became the photo negative of reality. The buildings and the people, the couples and teenagers, the cars going by on the street were pale shades, just whispers of what he knew was real and tangible.

But as it always was when he truly
looked
into the Ghostlands, the spirits themselves were solid, tangible.

“Hey,” he said.

As one the ghosts turned to stare at him in astonishment, even those he had thought barely sane. For just a moment, the sadness and loneliness left them all. Some even turned to glance at the others. A woman reached down to grip the hand of a little girl with curly blond hair. A horrible understanding came over Jack; these spirits were not unable to see one another. Rather, they could not provide one another with the things they all craved.

Light. Warmth. Hope. Rest.

He felt it from all of them, that craving. Though he would not have said he sensed their emotions in any supernatural fashion, he could not avoid a certain empathy with them.
Call it intuition,
he thought.

The woman who held the little blond girl’s hand had dark, exotic features and almond-shaped eyes. Her light summer dress rustled as she moved, as if blown by some ethereal wind. She took a step closer to Jack.

“
Who are you?”
she asked.

“My name is Jack,” he replied, not really knowing how to explain any better than that. “I’m a friend.”