Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (43 page)

At least he wasn’t vomiting; his stomach was queasy but he was holding down the orange juice Dad kept pushing at him.

He’d shown his father how to break down the Glock and wipe it dry. Here was where its mostly plastic construction was a blessing. Dad didn’t have any gun oil, but substituted a little 3-in-1 to lubricate the few metal parts.

And now his father paced back and forth between Jack and the TV as the Weather Channel showed a satellite photo of Hurricane Elvis picking up speed and power as it looped southward through the Gulf of Mexico. It had graduated to Category II and was expected to brush South Florida and the Keys sometime tomorrow, then continue on toward Cuba.

“We’ve got to call the cops,” Dad said.

Dad always seemed to want to call the cops.

“And what—tell them about this woman in the Glades who sent a swarm of bees and a two-headed snapping turtle after me? They’ll take you away in a straitjacket.”

“We’ve got to do
something
! We can’t just sit here like targets and let her take potshots at us!”

“I can’t think right now, Dad.”

Jack hauled himself unsteadily to his feet and shuffled toward the guest bedroom.

He’d planned to drop in on Anya tonight. He’d cut her too much slack, let her evade straight answers for too long. He was going to get nose to nose with her and find out exactly who she was, how she could keep giant alligators and bees and mosquitoes from trespassing on her property, and have them obey her when she told them to take off. He wasn’t going to leave until he had some answers.

But that was all changed now. Christ, he felt awful. If he’d been sitting on the hood of Dad’s car when it got clocked by that truck, he didn’t think he’d feel much worse.

“I’m going to hit the rack. In the meantime, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That’s all fine and dandy,” Dad said with a touch of acid in his voice, “except I don’t know
what
you wouldn’t do.”

“Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t leave the house tonight, that’s what I wouldn’t do. As for what I
would
do”—he pointed to the reassembled Glock resting on a section of the Novaton
Express
—“I’d keep that handy. See you in the morning.”

15

Jack awoke bathed in sweat. He threw back the covers, sat up, and pulled off his undershirt.

What time was it? The clock’s LED display was angled away from him. No light filtered through the curtains. Still night. He ran a hand over a tender, bumpy arm. God, he felt like hell.

As he flopped back and pulled the sheet up over him, he thought he heard a dog barking—high-pitched yips that could only belong to Oyv. They had an almost hysterical edge. Jack wondered what was bothering him. Not that the little guy couldn’t take care of himself—look at what he’d done to that big ugly gator—but he hadn’t struck Jack as the kind of pooch to bark at nothing.

Jack was ready to force himself out of bed to go have a look when the barking stopped. Whatever had set off Oyv must have passed.

Jack closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Sunday

1

I’ve
got
to get back to New York, Jack thought.

Not just because he missed Gia and Vicky, but here it was Sunday afternoon and instead of watching the Jets kick Dolphin butt up at Giants Stadium, he was sitting here with his father and staring at the Weather Channel.

Trouble was, he found it mesmerizing.

The Weather Channel as a way of life…scary.

I stay much longer I’ll be as addicted as everybody else around here.

He excused his present fascination by the fact that the weather was about to have significant personal impact: Hurricane Elvis had reentered the building. In fact he was announcing his presence with a chorus of gusts that hurled sheets of rain against the outside of this little building.

Satellite tracking of Elvis showed how it had made a sharp eastward turn during the night and homed in on the Everglades like a cruise missile. At this moment its eye was making landfall on South Florida’s west coast. Elvis wasn’t a monster; it was a tight little storm with sustained winds now in the 120-mile-an-hour neighborhood, making it a Category III. Multiple waterspouts had been spotted among the Ten Thousand Islands, wherever they were. But apparently it was a very wet storm and everyone was happy that it was going to dump a lot of much needed rain onto the Everglades.

But how many times could you watch the same graphic and listen to the same
Storm Center
report?

Gia apparently had been watching the weather too. She’d called to tell him to stay inside. Not that he had any intention of venturing out into this mess, but he appreciated her concern. He hadn’t told her about the bee stings. They were still swollen; not as much as last night, but still itchy and tender.

He was about to ask his father to switch the channel for half a minute—not a second more than that, God forbid—to check the score of the Jets game, when he heard a frantic knocking on the door. As his father peeled himself away from the tube to see who it was, Jack slipped the Glock from where he’d stowed it under his sofa cushion.

“Better let me get it, Dad.”

But before either of them could reach the door, it blew open. Jack had the pistol up and aimed at the figure standing in the doorway, his finger tightening on the trigger, when he recognized Carl.

“Come quick!” he cried as wind swirled around him and scattered sections of the Sunday paper. He wore a dripping, dark green poncho, had a screwdriver sticking out of his right sleeve, and a plastic shopping bag clutched in his left. “Y’gotta see this, y’just gotta!”

“See what?” Dad said.

“Miss Mundy’s place! It’s all tore up!”

Carl turned and started to lead the way, but once they were outside in the slashing wind and rain, Jack broke into a trot and pulled ahead of him. The sudden memory of Oyv’s barking last night sent a cold spike of unease through his chest. It speared down through his gut when he saw her doorway.

“Oh, shit!”

The screen had been shredded; gray, moss like tatters fluttered within the frame. The wooden door behind it stood open.

“Anya!” Jack shouted as he pulled open what was left of the screen door and stepped inside.

He stopped suddenly, just beyond the threshold, causing Dad to bump into him, pushing him forward.

“Oh, dear God!” he heard his father gasp.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Carl said. “Didn’t I?”

The place was a shambles. That was the only word for it. The furniture had been torn apart, the carpet gouged up, and the plants…they’d been torn from their pots, their roots savaged, and every leaf had been torn from the ravaged branches.

Jack forced himself to move forward, calling Anya’s name as he checked both bedrooms and behind the kitchen counter. He found a small spatter of darkening red fluid, and something that looked like a severed finger on the floor.

Jack knelt for a closer look. It was pale, the size of a finger, but it was covered with fur.

What the—?

And then he knew: Oyv’s tail.

Christ! The blood…Oyv had to be dead—died defending Anya no doubt. A slow wave of sadness settled over him. But what could have killed that preternaturally tough little dog? It had to be something bigger and meaner than a giant alligator. But what? And where was the rest of him?

Jack noticed something glittering on the floor. He bent closer: three little slivers of glass. He looked around for a broken window but didn’t see one. Maybe a glass had been knocked off the counter and shattered.

He was pushing himself to his feet when he noticed that all three shards appeared identical. Each about an inch and a half long, with the same curve, and the same taper from thicker base to needle-fine point. He picked one up and rotated it in the light. Its edges were smooth, rounded. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said it was a fang of some sort. But he didn’t know anything that had glass teeth.

He touched the point with the tip of his finger and it slipped through the skin like a bird’s beak dipping into water.

Damn! He started to toss it back to the floor, then decided not to. Maybe he should find out what it was before he threw it away.

He rose and grabbed a paper towel from the roll suspended from the underside of a cabinet. He rolled the needle within and used it to blot the drop of blood oozing from his fingertip.

He turned to his father and Carl, still standing in the doorway.

“What the hell happened here?”

Dad could give him only a stunned look, but Carl held up his plastic shopping bag.

“It’s all here!”

“What’s all there?”

“What happened. The camera caught it all. Or at least most of it.”

2

“When I picked up the camera this morning,” Carl said, “I was in a hurry so it just sat in the bag till after I got home. Long after I got home.”

They’d all hurried back to Dad’s place to set up the camera for playback.

“You didn’t check it right away?”

“Nuh-uh. I figured, what for? I mean, I ain’t never seen nothin’ before and figured this wouldn’t be no different. So I just left it be until I was watchin’ the Dolphins game. That’s when I checked it and found the battery didn’t have no charge left. That ain’t happened before. So I recharged it and took a look to see if somethin’d set it off.”

“What’s this camera about?” Dad said.

Jack ran through a quick explanation of Dr. Dengrove’s attempts to catch Anya watering her yard.

“Dengrove,” Dad said. “Cheats at golf but God forbid anyone sneaks a little water onto their lawn. What an ass.”

Jack had the two-inch LCD screen flipped open. He hit PLAY and started to watch. Dad hung over his shoulder, Carl crouched farther back. The screen lit with green and black blobs that quickly stretched and coalesced into recognizable shapes—the side of Anya’s house, her plantings, the doo-dads, the lawn furniture in her front yard. And then a set of legs went by. Then more.

“Doesn’t this thing have any sound?” Dad said.

“If you hook it up to your TV you can get sound. Want me—?”

“We can do that later if we need to,” Jack said. He had a sick cold feeling in his gut that they’d be listening to the high-pitched barking he’d ignored last night. “First let’s see what’s to see.”

Carl jabbed a finger toward the little screen. “There they are! See?”

Jack saw. A crowd was gathering in an irregular semicircle around the edge of Anya’s lawn. Light from the front windows lit their faces. His intestines began to writhe as he recognized Luke and Corley and a couple of the others. Looked like the whole gang had shown up.

“The clan,” he said.

“All cept Semelee. I didn’t see her nowheres when I watched.”

Jack stared at the tiny screen. He now wished they’d hooked it to the TV. Probably would have lost some resolution, but maybe he’d have a better view of their faces. Beyond a few grins, he couldn’t make out much in the way of expressions. He could read their postures, though, and they radiated something between revulsion and avid fascination, as if they wanted to press forward for a better look, but fear held them in check.

He kept watching, waiting for the clan to do something. He searched for Semelee but couldn’t find her. That white hair of hers would be hard to miss. Why were all the men there? What did they have against—?

Oh, right. The big ugly alligator…her dog had chewed a hole in its side. And the bees yesterday…Anya had chased them off. Yeah, he could see where Semelee could have a bone or two to pick with Anya. But how was she going to get her if Anya’s promise—
Nothing on earth can harm you here
—was true?

Obviously it wasn’t. Someone had got to her—and to poor little Oyv. What had Semelee—?

“There!” Carl cried. “Didja see that?”

“No.” Jack’s attention had been wandering. “What?”

“I saw something too,” Dad said, “but I don’t know what.”

Jack found the reverse button and backed up the recording. Again he watched Luke and the rest of the men standing in their semicircle, eyes fixed on the front of the house. The camera angle didn’t include the front door, but they were staring like there was a stripper doing her thing there. And then something—maybe three somethings, two feet long at most—suddenly streaked out of the house and over their heads. The way the men ducked and covered made it pretty obvious that they were afraid of the things, whatever they were. More flew out. Once they were gone, the clan came to life. Luke swung an arm and they all charged toward the house.

For a good five to seven minutes, nothing happened, and then the clan reemerged. A group of them seemed to be carrying something but the way they were bunched together prevented him from seeing exactly what. He didn’t have to see. He knew.