Price of Angels (20 page)

              Ghost glanced up with surprise, but as a rule, the man never startled. “Yeah?”

              Michael braced himself inwardly. Here went nothing. “I think I want to take you up on your offer. You’re right; I need a little time off.”

              Ghost nodded and went back to his paperwork. “Good. Fine. Whatever you need.”

              Was it really that easy? He’d never tried it, so he hadn’t known. Ghost had been the one to suggest a break to begin with, but so often, people went back on their word.

              “You’re sure?”

              Ghost spared him a curious look. “Yeah. Go visit your uncle. Get laid. Something. You’re too wired.”

              Michael searched his mind for a secret disappointment. Had Ghost told him no, then he would have had a valid reason for backing out on Holly. If he’d wanted it. Turned out, he only felt relief. He didn’t want out of his commitment to Holly. In fact, now that he was free, all he really wanted was to get to her.

              “I’ll have my cell, if you need to reach me.”

              “Sure.” Ghost gave him an absent wave. To the secretary, he said, “Is this your handwriting here?”

              “Y-yes, sir,” she stammered, taking a tentative step toward him.

              Michael turned and stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine, feeling like a great weight had slid off his shoulders.

              He might be nervous, later, when he had to lie to his club, pretend he had no idea what had happened to Abraham, Jacob and Dewey Jessup. But for now, all he felt was a sweeping exuberance. Like the wings down his shoulders might actually lift, and carry him the distance to the demons that needed slaying.

Ten

Dewey lingered out in the street for hours, long after the Lean Dogs’ old ladies were gone, long after night had fallen, and he was nothing but a slinking shadow against the backdrop of lit windows across the way.

              Holly had progressed from a point of mindless shaking to a semi-stable state of deep-breathing and stiff-smiling her way through her shift. Dewey wasn’t as dangerous as the other two. Dewey was the informer, the squealer, the watcher. They’d figured out, somehow, that she must work here, and now they were setting up a vigil, waiting on her. Carly had been a stupid mistake. They would be more careful now.

              When Michael came in, she released an audible sigh of relief. The sight of him crossing the boards was like watching the sun come up. He illuminated her world, pushed the darkness back, made it possible to breathe properly.

              Holly went to him right away, empty-handed. There was no need for pretense anymore.

              As she slid into the booth, his eyes came to her face and she watched him detect the panic in her, the way his expression became grim, his jaw tight. To anyone else, the changes in his face would have been impossible to notice; she knew its little movements so well by now that she recognized the strong reaction in him. He sensed the fear in her, and it brought a radiant, animal light to his hazel eyes that left her shivering.

              “What?” he asked, elbows propping on the table, head thrusting toward her beneath the lamp. He was at complete attention.

              Holly had to wet her lips before she could speak. Her mouth had become cardboard during her afternoon of constant stress. “Dewey,” she whispered. “He’s been outside on the sidewalk all day. Waiting.”

              Michael tossed a fast, feral glance over his shoulder, toward the door. “Dark hair? Big ears?”

              She nodded.

              His lips pressed together, turning white. His eyes shifted away from her and across the bar, over the tables and patrons and beer-sign bedecked walls.

              “I don’t think he can see through the windows,” she said. “They’re so dark. And I think, if he’d caught sight of me…”

              “He’d have come in here,” Michael finished in a tight voice. He sent her a sudden, pointed look. “Or called for backup.”

              “Yeah.” Her throat tightened and it was hard to swallow. “He was never very useful for anything. Abraham and Jacob must have dumped him off, so he could keep watch.”

              Michael took a deep breath and seemed to collect himself, closing off the visible emotions so he seemed like his normal, closely-guarded self. “Okay, so here’s what we’ll do…”

              A sharp gust of frigid air passed across her bare legs. It rustled paper napkins to the floor and drew startled, unhappy exclamations from the female patrons.

              Someone had opened the door.

              Holly looked toward the entrance and heard the panicked, strangled sound that tried to leave her throat.

              Dewey was standing just inside the air lock, shivering and chafing at his arms through the sleeves of his thin canvas jacket. He looked so out of place: too thin inside his ill-fitting clothes, his feet turned at awkward duck angles, his ears casting shadows down onto his shoulders, like extendable side mirrors on a big truck.

              Michael didn’t have to turn. “He came inside,” he said, voice sharp-edged.

              “Yes.”

              He spoke quickly, words clipped. “What will he do if he sees you?”

              “Probably try to talk to me. He was always the one who tried to…reason with me.” She gulped down the bile that pressed at the back of her tongue.

              “What if he sees you, and you walk away?”

              “He’ll come after me.”

              “Good. Get up, go in back, and let him follow you. Lead him somewhere out of the way, and keep him there.”

              She gripped the edge of the table and felt the tendons leaping in her wrists. Her gaze was fixed on the man who’d pledged to be her husband just before her hands were bound to the bedposts. She’d known dread back then, as his clammy hands had stroked her naked skin and he’d professed that his rape was something divine and loving. But now, after she’d been part of the world beyond that farmhouse, dread wasn’t a strong enough word anymore.

              “I can’t go back,” she whispered. “Michael, I can’t go back, I can’t!”

              “Holly.” He thumped his fist down onto the table, drawing her attention. “Do what I said. Go in back, lead him away from here. I can’t do anything in the middle of all these people.”

              She stared at the tightness of the bones in his face, at his pale skin like quartz in the lamplight, the fire in his eyes. He looked evil and awful. And beautiful. As beautiful as St. Michael as he’d stood above Lucifer.              

              “You won’t go back,” he said. “Hol, I promise you, sweetheart, that you won’t go back.”

              He said, “Trust me. Lead him away.”

              She studied him a long moment, drawing as much strength and grace from his burning eyes as she could, and then she got to her feet, sliding from the booth in a deliberate way, bending over to retrieve her empty tray. If Dewey didn’t glance at the way her white silk shorts rode up as she leaned forward, then there was nothing masculine inside him. And if he didn’t recognize her face when she straightened…

              There, his gaze, fixed to her, his mouth slightly open, his small chest heaving as he drew in a deep breath. He’d seen her.

              Holly made eye contact for one terrible moment, one in which she tumbled unwillingly into the past, remembering all those times he’d told her how special she was, as the ropes bit into her and he heaved his skinny body against hers while her father watched.

              She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw her tray at him like an Olympic discus and sever his head with it.

              Instead she whirled, and ducked between the two registers beside the fountain drink station, and headed down the dark, narrow back hall toward the restrooms.

              She heard her shallow, frantic breathing echoing against the close walls, her sneakers scuffing at the boards.

              Somewhere private, Michael had said. The restrooms wouldn’t do. Anyone could walk in on them. She thought about the alley, and then she thought about Carly and dismissed it. She didn’t want to leave the building. She wanted Michael to be able to find her.

              She was rounding the corner at the back of the hall, turning away from the exterior exit, headed for the locker room when she heard Dewey’s voice behind her.

              “Holly! Holly, wait!”

              She broke into a jog.

              Not the locker room – it was empty now, but who knew if it would stay that way. The girls were always going back to reapply lipstick.

              The hall took another sharp right-hand turn and she reached the staircase that led up to the closed second story. Like so many of the downtown businesses, Bell Bar had residential and office space up above, but it hadn’t been used for years, and had been deemed unsafe by the city. The owner, Jeff went up sometimes, using the extra square footage for storage. But now there was a plastic chain stretched across the bottom of the stairwell, a Keep Out sign fixed at its center.

              Holly clambered over the chain and started up the dark, dark passage, footsteps too loud on the old wooden stairs.

              “Holly!” Dewey called again. He was catching up.

              There was a hall at the top of the stairs, one she could only detect by feel, hands skimming along the dusty plaster on either side of her as she stumbled forward through the dark. There was a light ahead of her, something dim and yellowish, and she moved toward it.

              “Holly! Don’t run from me!”

              The hall emptied into a gallery at the front of the building, one enclosed by a long row of tall windows that perched above the Bell Bar sign on the outer wall below. The light, she knew now, was coming in from the street, the glow of streetlamps and headlights and neon signage in the windows, and the silvery dim glow of the moon, lost amid the smeared yellows and golds of human light.

              Holly pressed her hands to the thick glass and tried to catch her breath, watching the traffic pass below her. This was as close to private at they were going to get. No one could see them from the street. Nothing but moldering junk and old ghosts present to witness what happened up here.

              Footsteps behind her.

              She turned, the window at her back, cold against her shoulder blades, and the ambient light struck off the oversized, childlike angles of Dewey’s face.

              His eyes were huge and wet, glimmering with tears. He approached her slowly, now that she was penned in, one hand hovering in the air like he wanted to reach for her, but wasn’t sure if he should.

              “Holly,” he whispered. “Holly, we looked all over for you. We were so afraid something bad had happened to you.”

              There’d been a time, before, when she’d felt some small shred of sympathy for this man-child, because he’d never been the one to strike her, or take the belt to her. The practitioner of tiny kindnesses in a world of cruelty, his lack of punishment a reward in and of itself.

              But she hated him now, as badly as she hated the other two.

              “What,” she said through her teeth, “bad could possibly happen to me out here? Away from you?”

              Confusion creased his forehead. He took another step closer, and then another. “Holly, why’d you run away? Why would you do that? You know I love you.”

              “Did you kill Carly?” she asked, seething, shaking as he crept even closer. “Was that you or Abraham?”

              “Holly–”

              “You thought it was me, didn’t you? And when you realized it wasn’t, it was too late, and she’d seen your face, and you killed her, so no one would know what you’d done.”

              The tears slipped free and began pouring down his cheeks, shining like glass. He snuffled, his face contorting with emotion. “No, no, I didn’t do that–”

              “You liar! Why are you here?” she demanded. “Can’t you find some other girl? Can’t you leave me alone?”

              “Holly, we love you,” he sobbed. “And we forgive you, for what you did. We–”

              His eyes widened, bugging out of his head. He gasped.

              Then Holly saw the hand at the side of his neck, the bright glint of the knife blade that pressed across his throat.

              “Not a sound.” Michael’s voice came like a low, canine growl from the shadows behind Dewey. His other hand, spectral as it emerged from the darkness, latched onto Dewey’s hair, fingers curling tight, pulling at the scalp.

              Steered between the cruel grip on his hair and the sharp blade at his Adam’s apple, Dewey shuffled to the side, Michael a shadowy wraith materializing behind him, spinning him, pressing him back against the wall.

              The knife shifted and flared as Dewey swallowed. He breathed in shallow huffs, the sweat gleaming on his face.

              Michael seemed inhuman, the way he was so still and coiled, patient in his furious intent. Again, Holly thought of him as canine, like the running silhouette of a dog on the back of his leather cut. All his weight bore down on the hilt of the knife, all of his strength holding back the blade, keeping it from biting into the flesh.

              “You want to say anything to him?” he asked her, and she saw the fast glint of his eyes, as he glanced over at her.

              Holly shook her head. “No. Nothing.”

              Dewey gasped, but Michael moved too fast for there to be a scream. There was no begging or pleading. Dewey’s gasp turned into a low, deep, outward press of breath, like the sound of air leaving an untied balloon.

              With a fluid, sure motion, Michael whipped the knife back and drove it between Dewey’s ribs, leaning into the hilt with hands, arms, shoulders, letting his body force the blade through the skin and tissue, into the heart.

              When he stepped back, Dewey’s lifeless legs crumpled, and he sank down against the wall. The knife was still in him. There was no blood. His head lolled to the side at an impossible slackness, his eyes open and fixed, his mouth agape.

              Dead.

              He was dead.

              No more Holly, Holly, Holly! No more clammy hands. No more cousin for a husband. No more crying at the side of the bed while Abraham took the belt to her.

              Dewey was dead.

              For years, three men had made her life the worst of waking nightmares, and now one of them was dead, in the span of a breath.

              A wild, giddy laughter built in her throat, and she closed her lips against it. She felt lightheaded. She felt sick. She felt –