Jay swallowed hard, his nostrils flaring with each gasp of breath that passed in and out them.
“How’s that for a bonus, eh?” the bum asked. “You can save a busload of little kiddies,
and
have your greatest question answered. How’s that for a deal?” And again he released Mari roughly, letting go of her head with a shove that almost toppled her. “And all you have to do is put one, two, three, four, five, six little bullets into that five on her chest. That’s all.”
But how could he? How? How?
“Do it,” the bum told him. Ordered him. “Do it. Save them. Get your answer. Do it.”
Once again, Mari began to nod, and Jay leveled the gun at her, looking through tears at her. At her plea, her silent plea to do it. To save the children.
“Yes!” the bum cheered, and then glanced to his rear. A thin glow was skimming the rise between them and Traction. “Now! Kill her!”
Jay’s finger began to press against the cold curve of the trigger, his muscles working but his mind, he was certain, ready to spilt into as many pieces as there were stars in the sky. He wanted Mari to live, wanted those children to live, wanted to know what the bum could tell him. He wanted it all, but he would trade it right then for a piece of the nothingness he had known not so long ago. Just to not
be
. To not be capable of this, party to this, a
slave
to this.
But he was, and his finger pressed that much more.
“Good,” the bum said, his voice coming down, coaxing now, urging now, the skim of lights now a half oval of brilliance almost atop the rise. “Go ahead, brother, you can do it. Let those children live. Have your answer. Go ahead. Yes. Go ahead.”
And Jay saw it now, from the glassy corner of his eye, headlights coming over the rise and at them. One set, two sets, three and four sets, coming fast.
“Gotta be soon, brother,” the bum urged him gently, and Mari was nodding, and Jay’s finger flexed off then back onto the trigger, ready to do what he had to do. Ready to kill the bearer of the sign. The sign that was five.
His finger began to squeeze down, the headlights racing at him, the whole lot aglow now, and Mari nodding and the bum nodding, too, saying, “Yes, brother, good, brother, save those children brother, yes. Know. End the mystery. Know
why
they had to die.”
Saying that yes, and bringing his hand up as he had so many times in front of Trinity Church. Bringing it up and smiling his smile and saying those words as the peace sign flashed. “Peace brother.”
Peace. The two fingers. The V.
V!
With quick and precise speed the gun moved with the motion of Jay’s upper body and swung at the bum, taking dead aim, Jay smiling now, the bum’s grin withering, and each of them looking at those two fingers that were spread to a V.
Jay squeezed the trigger fully once, the gun bucking in his grip and the cylinder spinning a fresh round to the ready, and twice, sending that killing spot of lead on its way, and three times, hitting the bum with each shot and sending him reeling, backpedaling onto the hood of the Honda, and as he slid down to the ground at its front, Jay stumbled over to him, looked down upon his gasping form, and put the last three bullets in his head.
And then the lights were upon him, and all around him, and he was thrown to the ground, the gun ripped from his hand, and he looked for Mari as a knee smashed his face to the hard asphalt, splitting the inside of his lip, but he could not see her, only feet, dozens of feet, and he heard radios crackling and things being said as cuffs were put on him and a blindfold put on him, and the whole of his body was tossed into a trunk that shut out the noise and made his world double dark and convinced him that he was going to die.
Final Interrogation
August 15
th
...daybreak
The room was still and quiet but for the hum of the lights. Jay’s gaze settled toward the table, while his captor’s could not be dragged from him at that moment.
“Her story,” Jay said, looking up now. “The happy moment she shared. Roman numerals. I wouldn’t have made the connection if she hadn’t told that story. I wouldn’t have seen the V as a five. He wouldn’t have had the mark.”
“He always had the mark,” Mr. Wright suggested, but Jay did not react to the awesome truth of that fact. Instead, he posed the question he’d waited through the hours to ask.
“Who was he?”
“Who?” Mr. Wright shrugged. “As far as I know he had no name. He took them on and shed them like hurricanes do.” The man’s blue gaze sparkled at his choice of words. “I guess that’s actually a good way to think of
what
he was—a psychic hurricane. Popping up somewhere with one name, playing his insane games with peoples’ lives, doing some damage and then disappearing. And then he’d show up in another place, with another name.”
“He did things before?” Jay asked. “Before he did all this to me?”
Mr. Wright nodded. “In places like Sandymount, Tennessee. McCone, Nevada. That beauty pageant in Louisiana.”
“The clippings,” Jay said breathlessly. “But that was...”
“A dream?” Mr. Wright wondered. “A pretty dead on dream, because those things happened. Those people got hurt. That Miss Louisiana contestant, she slit her wrists that night. And the lottery winner, well, the clipping you ‘dreamed’ had it pretty close, but like the paper you can pick up and read it didn’t tell the whole story. That bum gave a man named Theodore Spivey a gift something like what he gave you, only it had some unpleasant side effects.”
“He killed his family,” Jay recounted aloud. Recounted from his ‘dream’.
“And tortured. Only the papers didn’t say what kind of torture.”
“What did he do?”
“Well, his wife, he tied her in a chair and poured drain cleaner down her throat, and his kids, well, he cut them to bits and fed most of the pieces to stray dogs at the town dump.”
Jay grimaced, then the grimace went slack as a mental connection fired. “He asked me about that. About stuff like that.”
“Side effects of the medicine he was dishing out?” Mr. Wright nodded. “Wondering if you’d hacked Carrie to bits and all. He might have been surprised that you hadn’t. Or maybe not. Who knows.”
“Him,” Jay said, and Mr. Wright could not disagree. “But how do you know so much about him? Why do you know so much about him?”
“It was my job,” Mr. Wright replied. “I’ve been hunting him for going on twenty five years.”
“Hunting? You mean chasing, don’t you?”
“You chase what you want to catch,” Mr. Wright explained. “You hunt what you intend to kill.”
“Why were you hunting him?”
“You know all that he is capable of, and you have to ask that?”
Jay shook his head. “Why were
you
hunting him?”
Mr. Wright took a moment, it seemed, to craft his reply. “It was my job.”
“To kill him?” Jay reacted, the murky truth of what this man was, and wasn’t, coming clear now. “You aren’t anything like a police officer, are you?”
“You saw him put smiles on New York City cops’ faces and steer them around him. Do you think the boys in blue were up to the task of shutting him down?”
Jay didn’t, and he understood. Without comprehending, he understood. “What are you then?”
Mr. Wright considered the question before answering. “Your guardian angel, some might say.”
“But you were ready to do away with me and dump my body in a ditch,” Jay reminded him. “Why? Why me? Why did you have me restrained and thrown in that trunk?”
“Grady, I’ve been on this bastard’s ass since he played one of his funny games on the wrong person and the powers that be told me
sic em!
I’ve seen the aftermath of the damage he can do, and every time but this one he’s slipped away just before me and my team could flip his switch. What he did, what he was capable of doing, was impossible, Grady. Impossible. But somehow he made it all happen.” Mr. Wright leaned closer to Jay, laying his stout arms upon the table. “I tell you, I wasn’t sure he wasn’t the devil, Grady, and then I see
you
kill
him
. And that made me wonder just what the hell
you
were.”
Jay digested this through a few breaths. A few breaths that seemed more precious now that just minutes ago. “You would have killed me.”
“In a heartbeat,” Mr. Wright confirmed.
“But you didn’t. Why?”
“Your story. Certain information that became available.”
Jay motioned to the file. “What you put in there. That paper that made you order the handcuffs off.”
“Among other things, yes.”
Jay shook his head, the void left empty by the tale he’d told filling very quickly now with things equally fantastic. “You had one hell of a job, mister.”
“Well, it started out a job,” Mr. Wright began. “Twenty something years ago when I started after him it was just that: a job. After a few times seeing the wreckage of lives in his wake, it became my crusade. Then, eight years ago, it became personal.” Right then the man put his massive, work-chiseled hands to the table’s edge and pushed himself away from it. But there was no sound of chairlegs squeaking across the floor, just the whisper-smooth rustle of thin tires on concrete as the wheelchair that bore him rolled into view. He gripped the large rear wheels and maneuvered himself around the table until he was facing Jay from just a foot or two away, nothing between them but the atrophied twigs that were his legs. Black straps held the useless limbs together and to the chair. Jay gawked at them openly. “One night I was coming into Manhattan in a van that was rammed off the Brooklyn Bridge by a tour bus.”
“You...” Jay said with wondrous doubt. This was too much. Too...perfect. Almost as though events had been scripted to this incredible convergence.
“I was the only one of my people to survive,” Mr. Wright told his savior. “Broken back and noodles for legs, I made it out of the wreckage and to the surface of the river. It was inconceivable that I lived. Until now.”
The water, Jay remembered. Cold, cold water that had stung his throat, his lungs, and had choked the life from him as he writhed on the ground. The first death to befall him. The death meant for this man.
“I was coming for him,” Mr. Wright went on. “Might have finally gotten him if he hadn’t thrown that bus at me.”
“He knew you were coming,” Jay said, still in awe at the power that had shaped his world. Yet with that power there was still some mystery. “But how did you know to find him?”
Mr. Wright reached back to the file and retrieved a single page, a photocopy of a
New York Times
article and the accompanying picture, this one taken the day the bald man had been run down. The photo taken by surprise, the one that caught Sign Guy’s face in the shot. The one that had ripped the smile from his mug like a scab. “We kept our eyes on the papers, usually just to pick up on out of the ordinary happenings that he might have caused. Imagine my surprise when one of my people brought me this the day before we were chucked into the East River.”
Jay was quiet for a moment, then all he could say was, “My God.”
“Then for eight years he dropped off the radar. All the things he was doing then, just accidents. Tragedies that people get used to hearing about. No one would ever wonder
why
that pilot flew his plane into the ground, or
why
the bus driver drove into that quarry. Hell, until you started talking I thought I was in an accident on that bridge. I never saw the driver of that bus, but now I’ll bet he was smiling. That pilot, too. And Astrid’s bus driver. You see, none of these things pointed to him. I was beginning to think maybe we had gotten lucky and the bastard had stepped in front of a train, or something. Then...” Now it was Mr. Wright that quieted, all that had passed seeming due a reverence of sorts. “Then, on Wednesday, I’m sitting in a Denny’s in Baltimore, having breakfast with some boys from the office, and in the next booth I hear this guy talking to his brother about a trip he just got back from. He’s talking loud so I can’t not hear. I mean
loud
loud. Anyway, he’s showing his brother pictures, and he’s telling him what each one is, and I guess this guy has a thing for small towns and stuff, and he likes to drive through them and take these artsy kind of blurry black and whites from his car as it’s going by, and so he starts saying, ‘And this one, right here, Mikey, this is some bum in this town in Missouri, and I got this great shot of him sitting on this five gallon bucket just playing his harmonica, and did this guy have a smile! Whew!’ I tell you, Grady, I nearly shit right there. I remembered the
Times
picture that had brought me to New York, him on that bucket, just smiling away. It was incredible. Too good to be true, we thought, but when we got the pictures from this fellow we could see it was him. Blur and all, it was our guy. And that fellow in the Denny’s...”
“He had a mark,” Jay said, and Mr. Wright nodded confirmation of that mystical addition to the mix.
“He’d lost most of his hearing a few years before in a mine explosion that only he survived. What would you say? Spooky?”
“Very,” Jay concurred.
“From his pictures we got Plainview, and once we got there we had a talk with Max the barber and we found you. And him, as it turned out. Though by then finding him was a moot point. You’d done our job for us.”
Jay sat there for a moment, all that this man had told him filling his head, his thoughts, testing the mental circuit breakers that had survived the telling of the tale. They were still holding, but by how much? How close had he come to doing the bum’s bidding? He brought his hands up to the table and laced them together, squeezing hard, the horror of that end that had not come haunting him. Haunting him because part of that end he had wanted.
“Grady, are you all right?”
“He really knew, didn’t he? He knew why my parents died.”
Mr. Wright stared at Jay for a long moment, saying nothing, breathing slowly, steadily through consideration of his savior’s inquiry, finally reaching back to the file one last time and retrieving a single sheet of paper that he’d folded not long before. He opened it, flattening it as best he could on the uneven landscape of his lap, then handed it to Jay.