Someplace to Be Flying (2 page)

Hank could almost hear Moth’s voice in the back of his head. “You get involved, you get hurt. Plain and simple. And let me tell you, kid. There’s no percentage in getting hurt.”

It was a little late for advice now.

The man wasn’t interested in discussion. He pulled a handgun out from under that tailored dove-gray suit jacket and fired, all in one smooth move. Hank saw the muzzle flash, then something smashed him in the shoulder and spun him around, throwing him against the door of the Chev. The baseball bat dropped out of numbed fingers and went clattering across the pavement. He followed after it, sliding down the side of the Chev and leaving a smear of blood on the cab’s paint job.

Moth is going to be pissed about that, he thought.

Then the pain hit him and he blacked out for a moment. He floated in some empty space where only the pain and sound existed. His own rasping breath. The soft murmur of the cab’s engine, idling. The faint sound of Miles and Shorter, the last cut on the tape, just ending. The muted scuff of leather-soled shoes on pavement, approaching. When he got his eyes back open, the man was standing over him, looking down.

The man had a flat, dead gaze, eyes as gray as his suit. Hank had seen their kind before. They were the eyes of the men who stood against the wall in the back room of Eddie’s bar, watching the action, waiting for Eddie to give them a sign that somebody needed straightening out. They were the eyes of men he’d picked up at the airport and dropped off at some nondescript hotel after a stop at one of the local gunrunners. They were the eyes he’d seen in a feral dog’s face one night when it had killed Emma’s cat in the yard out behind her apartment, the hard gaze holding his for a long moment before it retreated with its kill.

The man lifted his gun again and now Hank could see it was an automatic, as anonymous as the killer holding it. Behind the weapon, the man’s face remained expressionless. There was nothing there. No anger, no pleasure, no regret.

Hank couldn’t feel the pain in his shoulder anymore. His mind had gone blank, except for one thing. His entire being seemed to hold its breath and focus on the muzzle of the automatic, waiting for another flash, more pain. But they didn’t come.

The man turned away from him, cobra-quick, his weapon now aimed at something on the roof of the cab. It hadn’t registered until the man moved, but now Hank realized he’d also heard what had distracted the killer. An unexpected sound. A hollow bang on metal as though someone had jumped onto the roof of the cab.

Jumped from where? His own gaze followed that of his attacker’s. One of the fire escapes, he supposed. He knew a momentary sense of relief-someone else was playing Good Samaritan tonight-except there was only a girl standing there on the roof of the cab. A kid. Skinny and monochrome and not much to her: raggedy blue-black hair, dark complexion, black clothes, and combat boots. There seemed to be a cape fluttering up behind her like a sudden spread of black wings, there one moment, gone the next, and then she really was just a kid, standing there, her weight on one leg, a switchblade held casually in a dark hand.

Hank wanted to cry a warning to her. Didn’t she see the man had a gun? Before he could open his mouth, the killer stiffened and an expression finally crossed his features: surprise mixed with pain. His gun went off again, loud as a thunderclap at this proximity, the bullet kicking sparks from the fire escape before it went whining off into the darkness. The man fell to his knees, collapsing forward in an ungainly sprawl. Dead. And where he’d been standing … the girl… .

Hank blinked, thinking the girl had somehow transported herself magically from the top of the cab to the pavement behind the killer. But the first girl was still standing on the roof of the cab. She jumped to the ground, landing lightly on the balls of her feet. Seeing them together, he realized they were twins.

The second girl knelt down and cleaned her knife on the dead man’s pants, leaving a dark stain on the dove-gray material. Closing the blade, she made it disappear up her sleeve and walked away to where the woman Hank had been trying to rescue lay in the glare of the cab’s headlights.

“You can get up now,” the first girl said, making her own switchblade vanish.

Hank tried to rise but the movement brought a white-hot flare of pain that almost made him black out again. The girl went down on one knee beside him, her face close to his. She put two fingers to her lips and licked them, then pressed them against his shoulder, her touch as light as a whisper, and the pain went away. Just like that, as though she’d flicked a switch.

Leaning back, she offered Hank her hand. Her skin was dry and cool to the touch and she was strong. Effortlessly, she pulled him up into a sitting position. Hank braced himself for a fresh flood of pain, but it was still gone. He reached up to touch his shoulder. There was a hole in his shirt, the fabric sticky and wet with blood. But there was no wound. Unable to take his gaze from the girl, he explored with a finger, found a pucker of skin where the bullet hole had closed, nothing more. The girl grinned at him.

All he could do was look back at her, stumbling to frame a coherent sentence. “What … how did you … ?”

“Spit’s just as magic as blood,” she said. “Didn’t you ever know that?”

He shook his head.

“You look so funny,” she went on. “The way you’re staring at me.”

Before he could move, she leaned forward and kissed him, a small tongue darting out to flick against his lips, then she jumped to her feet, leaving behind a faint musky smell.

“You taste good,” she said. “You don’t have any real meanness in you.” She looked solemn now. “But you know all about meanness, don’t your”

Hank nodded. He got the feeling she was able to look right inside him, sifting through the baggage of memories that made up his life as though it were a hard-copy resume, everything laid out in point form, easy to read. He grabbed hold of the cab’s fender and used it to pull himself to his feet. Remembering that first image of her he’d seen through his pain, that impression of dark wings rising up behind her shoulders, he thought she must be some kind of angel,

“Why … why’d you help me?” he asked.

“Why’d you try to help the woman?”

“Because I couldn’t not try.”

She grinned. “Us, too.”

“But you … where did you come from?”

She shrugged and made a sweeping motion with her hand that could have indicated the fire escape above his cab or the whole of the night sky. “We were just passing by-same as you.”

He heard a soft scuff of? boots on the pavement and  then the other girl was there, the two of them as alike as photographs printed from the same exotic negative.

The first girl touched his forearm. “We’ve got to go.”

“Are you … angels?” Hank asked.

The two looked at each other and giggled.

“Do we look like angels?” the second girl asked.

Not like any kind he’d ever seen in pictures, Hank wanted to say, but he thought maybe they were. Maybe this is what angels really looked like, only they were too scruffy for all those high-end Italian and French artists, so they cleaned the image up in their paintings and everybody else bought it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen real angels before tonight.”

“Isn’t he cute?” the first girl said.

She gave Hank another quick kiss, on the cheek this time, then the two of them sauntered off, hand in hand, like one of them hadn’t just healed a gunshot wound, like they weren’t leaving a dead body behind. Hank glanced down at the corpse, then looked back up the alley where the girls had been walking.

They were gone. He leaned against the cab for a moment, dizzy. His hand rose to touch his shoulder again and his fingers came away tacky with the drying blood. But the wound was still only a puckered scar. The pain was still gone. He’d be ready to believe he’d imagined the whole thing if it weren’t for the blood on his shirt, the dead man lying at his feet.

Straightening up, he finally walked around the corpse, crossing the pavement to join the woman he’d stopped to help. She sat on the pavement, back against the brick wall behind her, the lights of the cab holding her like a spotlight. He saw the same dazed expression in her features that he knew were on his own. She looked up at his approach, gaze focusing on him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know… .” She looked down the alley in the direction that the girls had taken. “She just took the pain away. I can hardly hold on to the memory of it … of the man … hitting me… .” Her gaze returned to Hank. “You know how when you’re a kid, your mother would kiss a scrape and you’d kind of forget about how it hurt?”

Hank didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

“Except this really worked,” the woman said.

Hank looked at the blood on his hand. “They were angels.”

“I guess… .”

She had short brown hair and was holding a pair of fashionable glasses with round tortoiseshell frames. One of the lenses was broken. Attractive, late twenties to early thirties, and definitely uptown. Well dressed. Low-heeled shoes, a knee-length black skirt with a pale rose silk jacket, a white shirt underneath. After tonight the outfit was going to need dry-cleaning.

Secretary, he decided, or some kind of businesswoman. A citizen, as out of place here as he’d be in the kinds of places where people had a life on paper and paid taxes. Met her Mr. Goodbar in some club tonight and things just went downhill from there. Or maybe she was working, he thought, as he noticed the camera bag lying in some trash a few paces away.

He rinsed his hand in a puddle, wiped it clean on his jeans. Then he gave her a hand up and fetched the bag for her. It was heavy.

“You a photographer?” he asked.

She nodded and introduced herself. “Lily Carson. Freelance.”

Hank smiled. He was freelance, too, but it wasn’t at all the same kind of thing. She probably had business cards and everything.

“I’m Joey Bennett,” he said, shaking the offered hand. They might have gone through an amazing experience together, but old habits were hard to shake. Joey Bennett was the name that went with the I.D. he was carrying tonight; Hank Walker didn’t exist on paper. Not anymore. “You need a lift somewhere?”

Her gaze traveled to the corpse. “We should call the police.”

She was taking this well. He reached up and touched his shoulder. Though he wasn’t exactly stressing out over it either. Those girls had done more than take away her bruises and the hole in his shoulder.

“You can call them,” he said, “but I’m not sticking around.”

When she gave him a surprised look, he nodded toward the Chev. “Gypsy cab.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Unlicensed.”

Now she understood.

“Then we can call it in from a phone booth somewhere,” she said.

“Whatever.”

Hank just wanted away from here. He’d sampled some hallucinogens when he was a kid and the feeling he had now was a lot like coming down from an acid high. Everything slightly askew, illogical things that somehow made sense, everything too sharp and clear when you looked at it but fading fast in your peripheral vision, blurred, like it didn’t really exist. He could still taste the girl’s tongue on his lip, the earthy scent she’d left behind. It was a wild bouquet, like something you’d smell in a forest, deep under the trees. He started to reach for his shoulder again, still not quite able to believe the wound was gone, then thought better of it.

“We should go,” he told her.

She didn’t move. “You’ve been hurt,” she said.

He looked down at his bloody shirt and gave a slow nod. “But they … those girls … just took it away. I caught a bullet in the shoulder and now it’s like it never happened. …”

She touched her cheek. There wasn’t a mark on it now.

“What’s happened to us?” she said. “I feel completely distanced from what just happened. Not just physically, but …”

She let her hand drop.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’s just the way we’re dealing with the stress.”

She nodded, but neither of them believed it. It was something the girls had done to them.

He led her to the passenger’s side of the cab and opened the door for her. Walking around back, he stopped at the trunk and popped it open. Between the coolers of beer and liquor on ice, he kept a gym bag with spare clothes. Talcing off his shirt, he put on a relatively clean T-shirt and closed the lid of the trunk. He paused for a moment as he came around to the driver’s side of the car, startled by the body lying there. He kept fading on it, like it didn’t really exist, like what had happened, hadn’t. Not really. He remembered the girl’s lips again, the taste of them, the faint wild musk in the air around her. Her breath, he thought suddenly, had been sweet-like apples.

His attention returned to the corpse. Frowning, he nudged a limp arm with the toe of his boot, moving it away from the Chev’s tire. Last thing he felt like doing was running over the thing. He picked up the baseball bat from where it had fallen and tossed it onto the backseat.

“Where to?” he asked when he joined Lily in the front of the cab.

She gave him an address in Lower Crowsea. Yuppie territory. He’d figured right.

She was quiet until they pulled out onto a main street and headed west. When she spoke, he started, almost having forgotten she was there. “How come you don’t get a license?” she wanted to know. Hank shrugged. He turned the cassette over and stuck it back in, volume turned way down now.

“This isn’t that kind of a cab,” he said.

He put an inflection in the way he spoke that he hoped would let her know this wasn’t something he felt like discussing. She took the hint. “Who’s that playing trumpet?” she asked. “Miles Davis.” ‘

“I thought so. And Wayne Shorter on sax, right? I love that stuff they were doing in the mid-sixties.”

Hank gave her a quick look before returning his attention to his driving. “You like jazz?” he asked, pleasantly surprised.

“I like all kinds of music-anything that’s got heart.”

“That’s a good way to put it. Miles sure had heart. I thought a piece of me died when he did.”

They were on Stanton Street now, the sky disappearing overhead as they entered the tunnel of oaks where the street narrowed and the big estates began. A few more blocks west, the houses got smaller and closer to the road. Most of these had been turned into apartments over the years, but they were still out of Hank’s price range. Everything was pretty much out of his price range. He took a right on Lee Street, then another on McKennitt and pulled up to the curb in front of the address Lily had given him.