Nightjack

  Nightjack

  Top

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  NIGHTJACK

  By Tom Piccirilli

  Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2010 by Tom Piccirilli & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

  This book was copy-edited by Neal Hock

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  MORE FROM TOM PICCIRILLI & CROSSROAD PRESS

  SHORT RIDE TO NOWHERE

  Jenks and Hale aren't friends, partners, or even next door neighbors anymore. Not since they each lost their jobs and had their homes foreclosed. Not since they lost their wives and kids and whatever stability they'd fought for in the world. Adrift on the streets of New York, Jenks' dark path seems to parallel Hale's step by step.

  After Hale is found nearly dead beside the corpse of a nine-year-old girl, and soon after commits suicide in a mental hospital, Jenks decides to find out just what the hell happened. What happened to Hale and the girl, what happened to the wayward American Dream, and what happened to his youth and forfeited hopes.

  Because whatever happens to Hale happens to Jenks just a few months later.

  THE FEVER KILL

  Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree.

  It's where his father the sheriff met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It's where crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line ten years earlier.

  Now Crease is back. He's been undercover for so long that most days he feels more like a mobster than a cop. He doesn't mind much: the corrupt life is easier to stomach than a wife who can't understand him, a son who hates him, and a half-dozen adopted kids he can't even name anymore. He's also just gotten his drug-dealing, knife-wielding psycho boss Tucco's mistress pregnant.

  A fine time to decide to settle old scores and resolve a decade-old mystery.

  With Tucco hot on his tail, Crease has to find his answers fast. Who kidnapped little Mary? Who really killed her? Was his own father guilty? And what happened to the paltry fifteen grand ransom that seems to spell salvation to half the population of Hangtree? The town still has a taste for his blood and secrets it wants to keep. Crease has a single hope; a raw and raging fever driving him toward the truth that might just burn him up along the way.

  For Michelle

  and Byron and Edgar

  my two pals who were there with me through it all

  and Criswell

  who we lost along the way

  Miss you, my boy

  and Jack Barbera

  more Jack than you can handle!

  and in memory of Jack Cady

  Jack of All Trades, Master of Each

  PART I

  Persona Non Grata

  one

  Are you cured?

  They actually ask you that right before you step back into the world. While you’re standing there in the corridor, twenty feet from the front door, holding tightly to your little bag of belongings. You’ve got a change of clothing, five or six prescriptions, the address and phone number of a halfway house. A few items they let you make in shop, what they called the Work Activities Center. Maybe a birdhouse. A pair of gloves that didn’t fit.

  Pace had an ashtray and a folded-up pair of pajamas that he’d stitched together himself on an old-fashioned sewing machine. It reminded him of the one William Pacella’s grandmother had in her bedroom. She used to make clothes for the whole family, had this big sewing basket with two thousand miles of multi-colored threads and yarn. She’d crochet sweaters for him every year for Christmas. Always in the hairnet, wearing black, she’d say, Non strappi questi, mie mani sono vecchio. Don’t rip these, my hands are old. Pacella would hug her and hear the click of her poorly-fitted dentures as she pressed her wrinkled lips to his cheek.

  Are you cured?

  A final test to see if you’re really on your toes. Like you might suddenly drop, fling the pajamas aside, and thump your chest with your fists. Cry out, No, I’m still insane, you’ve found me out, seen through my thin charade, damn your eyes.

  But then again, you could never tell, it had probably happened before.

  So they escort you back to your room, unfold your pajamas, put the ashtray back on the nightstand, and get your slippers ready for your feet again. You step into the lounge area and all the other headcases look at you like the prize screw-up you are. Sort of laughing while they say, You botched the question, didn’t you. We practiced and rehearsed but you went and told them the truth, that you were still nuts. The hell’s the matter with you?

  The other wrong answer was when you told them, Yes, I’m fine. Then they knew you were still fucked.

  What they really wanted to hear you say was that you were sick and you’d always be sick, and you knew you’d always be sick but that you’d make an effort to stay stable by taking your medication regularly. That you’d attend the outpatient group therapy sessions, keep in touch, and if you had any serious troubles along the way, you’d check yourself right back in for a short-term observation period.

  So Pace told them that.

  He meant it, too, and thanked them for all they’d done. Humbly grinning at the nurses, the guards, the other staffers of Garden Falls Psychiatric Facility. All of them moving off down the hallways, giving him the stink eye that said, Whatever happens, just don’t come back here. We have enough trouble.

  All right, so he was almost back on the street. He looked left and right down the corridor once more, feeling a little lost. He was alone now. It was a condition he didn’t like and couldn’t seem to get used to.

  He started for the front door and stopped. He was supposed to wait here for somebody. For a minute he couldn’t remember who, and then—as she stepped from her office and came at him—he did. His shrink, the assistant Chief of Staff, Dr. Maureen Brandt, was at his side, moving in sync with him as they walked to the exit, shoulder to shoulder.

  Dr. Maureen Brandt. The name didn’t exactly slide off the tongue. He’d worked it around in his mouth for almost two years now. She often frowned when he said her name because he usually rested on it an extra second, as if he had to remember it all over again. She’d jot notes on her pad and look up at him without raising her chin, her dark gaze burrowing into his head. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant feeling.

  “How are you doing, Will?” she asked.

  All the nutjobs on the ward always said fine because they didn’t have the wit to say anything else. The candor had been burned out of them with primal scream therapy. Three in the morning and these idiots are practicing their prehistoric shrieks, regressing back to cavemen. Hauling ass down the hallways trying to escape the mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. This was supposed to help them with the issues they had with their parents, the oily uncles who took them into the bathroom. Instead, it just started the whole zoo shrieking.

  Pace opened his mouth and the word wasn’t his word. The voice wasn’t his voice either. It said, almost buoyantly, “Fine.”

  Dr. Brandt smiled at Pace, the condescension mixed with something else. Fear maybe, or disappointment. Like she missed the man he was before she got her hands on him.

  Her face was one of those sculptures that looked too perfect to be real. So beautiful it had a kind of a
wful magnificence that had enthralled him from the beginning. It didn’t have so much to do with her looks as it did with what lurked beneath. A kind of force he connected with even though he couldn’t see it and didn’t know what it was.

  It made him ache. Her prim gait, the angle and curve of her thigh beneath the plaited skirt. The thrust of her breasts under the suit jacket. If her hair was in a bun he’d be living out a porn movie scenario—they hit the music and she pulls the ribbon. The hair comes loose and with a casual flinch the jacket and skirt fall to the floor. Except her hair was never in a bun.

  The first time he’d seen her he was just waking up in the hyper-white hospital room, strapped into this funky straitjacket that was tied to stainless steel railings surrounding the bed.

  It was supposed to induce calm, revert you to the pre-natal lull of the womb. Give you the feeling that you were weightless, hanging there in mid-air. Like you might wake up unable to move and actually feel good about it. Just turn your chin aside and smile at the three doctors and two burly attendants standing around waiting to pummel the shit out of you if you got out of line.

  Dr. Maureen Brandt introducing herself by name while she flicked a fingernail against a syringe, making sure there were no air bubbles. Pace looked down and saw he was completely covered by the straitjacket, even his feet. The only place she could push the plunger was into his neck.

  Unless your mother had a significantly fucked-up pregnancy, this was not the pre-natal lull of the womb.

  The biggest irony here: He’d voluntarily committed himself.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Will?” she asked as they hit the front door. He was back in the present. He had some trouble keeping himself focused on the here and now.

  She carried her briefcase with a sort of haughty air, swinging it a little. Five pounds of notes, files, charts, digital video, and transcribed interviews. Two years of his life distilled into the most boring reading anybody would ever have to suffer through. Every third word something you’d have to run to the Psychiatrist’s Dictionary to look up. His life, all his many lives, all the many hims, laid out like tacked luna moths.

  “Yes,” Pace answered. “I’m fine.”

  It was drizzling. They headed down the cement walkway to the guard station. The guy in the tiny booth perked up when he saw Pace coming. He stood with a hand on his taser, hoping he’d get to yank it and fire some current into an escapee’s ass.

  Pace wondered if it would affect him, the way he felt. Maybe it would wake him up some.

  They entered the booth. Dr. Brandt still had to sign reams of release forms. Every piece of paper saying that Pace was sane, or if he wasn’t, she’d take responsibility for it.

  Talk about ego.

  Smiling like she was thinking, Sure, if this guy goes Ginsu crazy, I’m responsible, you come slap me around for it when someone else winds up dead.

  “You want an escort to the train station, Doctor Brandt?” the guard asked.

  “That won’t be necessary, Ernie.”

  Thunder murmured. The rain began to pelt down a little harder, in spurts. Ernie glared at Pace because the secret was out. There really was somebody named Ernie who hadn’t climbed Kilimanjaro or lived with a banana-head in a basement apartment on Sesame Street.

  This was the Ernie you got. The guy glowering like he wanted to beat you to death with a ball-peen hammer. That was all right, it was easy to understand why. Pace’s room on the ward was three times bigger than this little booth Ernie practically lived in all year round. Made you wonder who was the lunatic.

  While Dr. Brandt went through the paperwork, Ernie pressed a hand to Pace’s chest and shoved him out of the booth and into the rain. Pace dropped his bag of belongings at his feet. He heard the ashtray he made in Work Activities break against the cement.

  Ernie leaned in close and said, “So, they really messed up this time letting a prick like you go.” Then he slapped Pace twice, very hard and fast.

  Pace’s ears rang. He took another step back and Ernie grabbed him by the collar, pulled him closer, and hissed in his ear, “Listen to this, killer.”

  “What?”

  “If I ever see you again, I’m going to hurt you so badly you’ll never walk again. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Ernie,” Pace said.

  “Do you?” Ernie slapped him again. “Do you got it good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, because there’s nothing else I’d like better than to—”

  Pace blinked and saw Ernie’s eyes roll up into his head and blood begin to rim his nostrils. Ernie’s sharply angled features fell in on themselves like wet clay drooping. Pace watched as a hand came up and thumbed two small wads of cloth up Ernie’s nose.

  Pace cocked his head, puzzled. The hand pressed against Ernie’s sternum and kept him propped against the side of the booth.

  It took another second before he realized he’d just broken Ernie’s nose without actually seeing it happen.

  Sometimes you were idle even when you were moving—like falling inside a dream. Sometimes you were in motion when you thought yourself immobile, like now. It got confusing.

  Pace stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and felt that the lining had been torn out. That’s what he’d crumpled and jammed up Ernie’s nose.

  Ernie started to slump but the hand came back and braced him again.

  Dr. Brandt exited the security booth and said, “Thanks, Ernie,” without looking too closely at him. She had her head down against the rain. Pace picked up his bag with his pajamas and broken ashtray and stepped in line beside her as they proceeded down the block in the direction of the train station. Ernie slid down the wall.

  She said, “Will, is anything wrong?”

  “No.”

  The sound of Ernie hitting the ground and falling over into the mud was muffled by the rising wind. Pace thought, I should be laughing. Why aren’t I laughing?

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am.”

  “Okay then. I don’t want to push.”

  “You’re not pushing.”

  “You have parameters. You have your safety zone. If I’m encroaching, simply inform me.”

  “You’re not encroaching on my safety zones,” he said. The fuck are safety zones?

  Maybe he wasn’t laughing because the rain reminded Pace of Jane, William Pacella’s murdered wife. He held his palm out and watched it fill up and spill over. Pacella and his wife had spent a lot of time together in the rain, out east on Long Island, down at the south shore sailing and walking on the beach. He caught a glimpse of the wife’s face wreathed in flame, her lips melting off. She was trying to say his name, but the flesh ran into her mouth and she had to spit it free.

  Another moment passed before Pace noticed he’d stopped and Dr. Brandt had continued walking and was way ahead of him standing at the corner, staring back.

  There were always eyes on you, and then they went and wrote on your chart that you were paranoid.

  He caught up and said, “Sorry, shoelace was untied.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They continued on and the subtle tension between them grew thicker. Maybe it was sexual in nature. Perhaps he hated her for what she’d done to him, the things he couldn’t fully remember. Worse things than the needle in the neck. His mind seemed to be made of flitting images, clips of a history that warned him not to delve too deep. Funny how your head tried to protect you, to keep you outside your own skull.

  Three blocks away, the train station loomed through the gray afternoon. It was so close to the hospital because back in the early forties they used to route thousands of shell-shocked vets to Garden Falls from all across the country. There were plaques and photos all over the hospital showing guys fighting in the Pacific Theater, holding up American flags, getting decorated by Eisenhower.

  She was going to hit him with a trick question soon.

  She carried an umbrella but hadn’t opened it yet. What the hell did that tell you
about her? What symbol did you take away from it? That she thought she was dirty and needed to wash herself clean? Water is a birth sign—did she want children? He could imagine what the psych books would say. If it was Pace standing there with the folded umbrella in a downpour, you could bet your disability check the doctors would have something to say about it, happy as hell to see such a display. Like spotting the pervert who keeps forgetting to zip his fly.

  She kept talking and he answered by nodding and uhm hmming. She explained to him what would be necessary for him to stay healthy. How often he needed to take his pills, how the halfway house would be run. He would have to be in by seven p.m. every night, before dark. He couldn’t drink. The job they’d found him was some kind of factory work in a fish cannery.

  She talked non-stop the whole way to the station. She kept looking back over her shoulder, checking all around, and he started doing the same thing. Now what was the matter? The streets were empty. Nothing but a couple of colorless motels and closed shops lining the road. Just enough of a burg for the families of the patients to buy the necessities for their ill children, schizophrenic wives, bipolar husbands, over-tranqed parents. You had to wonder about a town whose main source of income was the import of psychotics.

  Dr. Brandt made a joke about the factory where he’d can the fish. It wasn’t funny. He heard himself responding to her animatedly, and even with some sardonic humor. It struck him as funny and he hacked out a guffaw. A low, flat sound almost evil in its implication. She turned her head and looked at him, and he smiled pleasantly.

  The trick question, here it was.

  “Will, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get to the halfway house?”