Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (8 page)

“Jack and Molly will probably be back by six or so. They’re not on the schedule, but I’m sure I can shanghai one of them.”

“Okay,” Janis said quickly. “Well, thank you. Really, Courtney. Thanks.”

Touched by the gratitude in the girl’s voice, Courtney grew even angrier. The idea that Janis could be driven out of Bridget’s, made to risk her job by bailing in the middle of a shift because some jerk was harassing her . . . it stoked a fire in her that Courtney usually held a pretty tight rein on. Her mother would have called it an Irish temper. Courtney just thought of it as human nature.

“Go on,” Courtney said, mustering a kind smile for Janis. “Go home.”

Janis thanked her again and double-timed it into the back to get her things. Her half-eaten meal forgotten, Courtney went to the hostess stand by the front door. Wendy Bartlett sat at a table to the right of the door, beneath the windows that looked out on Nelson Street, and rolled sets of clean silverware up into green cloth napkins, something useful to kill the time before the dinner rush began.

“Hey,” Courtney said.

The second she saw the look on Courtney’s face, Wendy tensed up. “What is it?”

Courtney shook her head. “I’ll tell you later. I may need you to wait tables once the rush starts.”

Wendy shrugged. “You’ve got it.”

That taken care of, Courtney hustled back toward the kitchen. She was such an expert with her cane after nearly a decade using it that her gait barely qualified as a hobble. She passed Janis on the way, who thanked her quietly one final time before leaving.

When she pushed through the doors into the kitchen, Courtney spotted a pair of waitresses—Kiera Dunphy and Jenny Boyce—at the counter waiting to pick up dinner orders for their customers. They turned around the second she came in, and something in her expression wiped the smiles off their faces.

“Kiera. Jenny. Give me a minute with the guys, will you?” Courtney asked.

The waitresses exchanged a glance, then agreed quickly and went out into the dining room. A radio played WZLX somewhere back in the kitchen, and steam rose all around. The temperature was twenty or thirty degrees hotter back there, even with the air conditioner pumping, and when Tim Dunphy appeared behind the counter, his face was damp with perspiration and the tattoos on his arms gleamed. Tim was Kiera’s brother, a good guy from a rough South Boston neighborhood, and he ran the kitchen nine nights out of ten.

“What’s up?” Tim asked, his Southie accent thick.

“Can you come around here?” Courtney asked.

Tim frowned. He ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head. “Sure. How come?”

Courtney didn’t respond, but she let him know with a look that she needed him to comply. She did not want to say it out loud, but it was important for the other kitchen staff to see Tim as being on her side, rather than on theirs. There were eight people on in the kitchen at the moment, five cooks and three dishwashers. Another cook would come on at five. But when she was done, they were going to be one man down for the shift, and that never made them happy.

Tim came around the counter to stand next to her. He wiped his hands on a dishrag and glanced at her oddly, but said nothing.

“Guys!” she called. “Can I have your attention please?”

Dougie and another cook had already wandered over to where they could see her from behind the counter, and now the dishwashers dropped what they were doing as well. The other two cooks had food on the grill and on the stove, and so they kept working, though they were clearly listening.

“I’ve had complaints from members of the wait staff about harassment,” Courtney began. Then she glared at Dougie, searing him with her eyes. “One of them claims that she was groped back here.”

Tim swore, shaking his head angrily. “By who?”

“Dougie.”

The others all turned to look at Dougie, some with disdain but most with curiosity. Dougie sneered and threw his hands up.

“Janis. I can’t believe that bitch. I never touched her.”

Courtney laughed, though not in amusement. “Really? Then what makes you think it was Janis?” She looked around at the others. “I just wanted to make sure you all heard this, so I didn’t have to say it more than once. We don’t put up with that kind of crap here. Not ever.” Then she turned to Tim. “You’re going to be short a body tonight.”

“We’ll manage,” he assured her, his anger perhaps even greater than her own.

“Good,” Courtney said. Then she looked at Dougie. “You’re fired. Go. Now.”

With that, she glanced again at Tim, who nodded once in assent and support. Then Courtney walked out of the kitchen, a strange sort of exhilaration crackling in her like an electric charge. She had walked with a cane since she was nineteen years old and she did not get to kick ass very often.

It felt good.

But all that good feeling drained out of her when she looked across the pub and saw Jack and Molly coming through the front door. Both of them wore expressions of such despair that Courtney immediately wanted to reach out to them, and there was a kind of dark energy between them that told her they were at odds without a single word being exchanged. It looked as though their day off had not gone as well as she had hoped it would.

Jack turned toward Molly as though he wanted to say something but she only shook her head and kept walking. He watched as she made a beeline for the stairs that led to the apartment above the pub. Molly passed right by Courtney without even acknowledging her and went up the steps as though she were running away from something.

In the middle of the restaurant, with fans turning lazily overhead and heartbreak music on the sound system, Jack watched her go until the door at the top of the stairs closed. Then he shook his head and walked over to the bar. He sat at the far end, away from the small group of regulars, and Bill slid a Coke across the bar to him.

Courtney recalled having thought of this time of day as peaceful only minutes before. Now she hurried across the restaurant and up the step into the bar area, worried about Molly, but mostly concerned about her brother.

“What’s that all about?” she asked as she slid onto a stool beside him.

Jack smiled thinly. “Well, at least you guys are talking to me.”

Behind the bar, Bill crossed his arms and frowned. “She looked pretty pissed, Jack.”

Courtney’s little brother pushed his hands through his hair and groaned. “Yep.”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” Courtney told him.

“No. It’s all right.” He looked over at Bill, then at her, an expression so innocent on his face that he looked like a little kid to her again.

“While we were on the beach, I saw . . . a ghost. It was Artie. Something important came up and he just appeared there, hanging out over the water. I was surprised, you know? Who wouldn’t be? And I . . . I said his name.” At first Courtney didn’t understand. She was surprised, of course, because Jack had not mentioned seeing Artie’s ghost for a very long time, so she had thought his friend’s spirit had gone on to wherever lost souls went when they weren’t “lost” anymore.

Bill got it immediately, though. “You said his name. And she heard you,” the bartender said.

Jack nodded.

Then Courtney understood. “It had to happen eventually, Jack. I don’t know why you had to keep it from her in the first place. Sure, it would have been hard for her, but this has to be even harder.”

“It wasn’t my call,” Jack told her, throwing up his hands. “Artie didn’t want me to tell her.”

For long, drawn-out seconds the three of them stewed with their thoughts on the matter. Down the bar one of the regulars was trying to flag Bill down, but he ignored the guy. Normally Courtney would have chided him, but not right now. Jack needed them and the old barfly, Rollie McKeckern, was not going anywhere.

“What was so important?” Bill asked.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “Huh?”

“Artie had something urgent to tell you. What’s the crisis?”

As he explained it to them, Courtney shifted uncomfortably on her stool. Any time Jack talked about the spirits he saw, this Ghostlands, it gave her a chill. She thought of her mother and other people she knew who had died and wondered where their souls were.

Now, though, with this other thing, a monster in the Ghostlands, stalking the phantoms of people who were already dead . . . in some ways it was even more awful than the Prowlers. From the quaver in his voice, she could see that it was unnerving her brother as well, and why shouldn’t it? Jack had grieved for Artie once, and the idea that they still had to be afraid for him, for anyone who had already died, was horrifying.

Courtney shuddered as Jack told them its name: the Ravenous.

“Artie wants me to look into it, talk to a priest or, I don’t know, a psychic or something, and see if anyone knows anything about this thing. How to kill it, or at least stop it.” Jack looked at Bill. “You ever heard of anything like this?” Bill shook his head. “Sorry. My . . . my kind of people aren’t much into spirituality. Even the nonviolent ones are usually involved in more . . . physical pursuits.”

Courtney knew he was talking about other Prowlers who lived secretly among humans, just as Bill did. And what he said made sense. Prowlers were monsters in a way, yes, and directly linked to a lot of old myths and legends. But they were physical creatures, not supernatural beings.

“You could talk to Father Mike,” she suggested.

Jack perked up. “Y’know, I never even thought of him. Is he still at St. Mary’s?”

“I think he’s at St. Anthony’s now.”

St. Anthony’s was in the North End, a ten-minute walk from the pub.

“I’m going to go up and take a shower,” Jack said, deep in thought. “Then I think I’ll take a walk over there.”

Rollie McKeckern was getting agitated down the bar. Bill scowled at the man and went down to get him another beer. When Courtney glanced at her brother again, he was staring at something in the restaurant. She followed the line of his gaze and saw Molly coming down the stairs. Her unruly red hair was tied back in a thick ponytail and she had changed her clothes.

Courtney started to rise to go over to her. She had no idea what she would say, what she
could
say that would make Molly feel any better, but she had to try.

Or she would have, if the girl had even looked her way. Instead, Molly went across the pub and out the door without so much as a glance toward the bar. The sad cast of her features, her face pale and drawn, her eyes hollow, would linger with Courtney for hours.

The long summer afternoon seemed to stretch the sunlight so that it reached out across the sky and down into the city with a strength and tenacity it lacked any other time of year. The light was golden and perfect, and its warmth ought to have settled into her flesh, making her feel more alive.

But Molly did not feel warm at all. She felt cold and numb and somehow set apart from the rest of the world, held at a distance almost as though she herself was a lost soul wandering the Ghostlands, watching people pass by laughing and holding hands and knowing that those things were forever out of reach.

Oh, for God’s sake,
she chided herself as the thought crossed her mind.
Stop being so dramatic.

But she could not help how she felt, could not shake that feeling. It was ironic, yes, but it was real. Her junior year she got mono, and she remembered what it had been like the day she checked herself into the hospital. Her mother had been off with her boyfriend of the week, probably nursing a two-day drunk, and Molly had come home from school in a kind of haze where everything around her was a blur. By the time she got off the T near the hospital, she had no idea how she managed to get that far.

It was like that now.

One minute she was in front of Bridget’s and the next she was meandering her way in a fugue state through Boston traffic and tourists and employees who dared leave a few minutes before five, and found herself on Long Wharf, between the Marriott and the New England Aquarium, staring down at the dirty water where the sight-seeing boats bumped against one another in the dock.

Once upon a time, Artie had bought fresh-squeezed lemonade from a vendor right at this spot, and then accidentally spilled it all over himself in the midst of a rant about the state of the American prison system. Artie Carroll had felt everything passionately, and that was one of his greatest assets. He was also a guy with absolutely no control over his surroundings, and no faith that he could ever exert any. But that never stopped him from speaking his mind, and Molly had always admired that.

Jack was something else entirely. Passionate, yes. In some ways, just as passionate as Artie. Unlike Artie, though, Jack believed with all his heart that he could force his environment to behave the way he believed it should. That attitude—as naïve as Artie’s in its way—had kept Molly alive more than once, and she admired it. But there had been an innocence in Artie’s surrender to the world around him that Jack did not have . . . might never have had at all. Though Molly wondered if it had just been stolen from him the night a drunk driver killed his mother and crippled his sister, if Jack’s insistence upon controlling his world came from that one awful example of how uncontrollable it was.

As angry as she was now at Jack, she knew that she was just as mad at Artie. It made her head spin. How could she be so angry at a . . . a ghost. Artie was dead, and she missed him every day. But she had been trying her best to move on, to seal off the wound his death had left in her, knowing it would never heal but thinking that she could survive it.

And Jack . . . she felt something for Jack, something that neither one of them had expected, but that maybe they ought to have. They had been close, the best of friends, and shared so much. And they both had loved Artie. After his death, that shared emotion brought them closer than ever.

Then, a month ago, in Vermont, she kissed Jack. It would be easier for her to tell herself she knew she was going to do it, but the truth was she had been thinking about it for days by the time she finally did it. And it was not as though Jack had fought it.