Good Lord, Deliver Us (15 page)

"Sammy's afraid of men," the woman
whispered. "Because of his father." Or because his mother had
scared him about his father, Z thought.

Still, the woman could be telling the
truth. Though the "candle and blood" guys had been here for fifty
years, few people North-of-the-River knew it. Or wanted to admit it
if they did. Didn't fit the squeaky-clean image of the pastoral
Northland. The simple fact that the woman knew that the wise guys
were well-established in the north, gave her story a deadly kind of
credibility.

Hit man. Contract killer.
Bopper.

Z thought of what the woman was
asking: that Z take on the baddest of the bad guys, a man certain
to have survival skills superior to Z's own.

"Sorry, ma'am," Z said,
all business about
this
business. "Not my kind of case."

The woman motioned him to
keep his voice down, something
no
one had done since Z's vocal cords began to go.
"Sammy's room is just behind that doorway," she whispered,
pointing. "He can hear practically everything said in here. That's
what's wrong with him. He heard his father and me. Heard his father
say he was going to kill me. Heard his father say he'd kill
us
both
."

Finally
, something she'd said that made a difference. If a man
threatens to kill his estranged wife, it's a common occurrence and
no big deal. But for a man to make noises about killing his son
......

Z must have showed a change of
heart.

"You'll try to help me?" Said
eagerly.

"Two hundred a day." Blood
money, given the small size of the woman's house. Blood money if
the husband turned out
really
to be a hitter; in all likelihood,
Z's
blood.

"I could get Sammy to come out. Let
you see the marks on his body where his father beat him." The lady
was still being careful to keep her voice down.

"Not necessary."

"What I
can't
do is prove his
father sexually molested him, like my father did me."

A man molesting his own son? Maybe.
From watching nothing but the TV news, a person learned that
anything was possible these days.

"What would you want done?"

"Find some way ... to stop
him."

"I could talk to him." Z's voice was
tiring.

Suddenly, the woman was
standing close to Z's chair, bending down to whisper in his ear.
"If you help me, I'll ... do anything.
Anything
."

And Z believed her.
Particularly now that the woman was so close that he could see what
she
wasn't
wearing under her silk blouse. She'd also put on
perfume.

Z drew a breath of her rich scent --
his recent Jamie-bouts a help in maintaining the proper emotional
distance from a soon-to-be client.

"I could find him?"

Z's voice was
getting
really
thin -- not solely from overuse. Shaking his head to clear
it, Z forced himself to remember that hassling a hit man was the
last thing
anyone
should do. The last thing the hassler often
did
.

The lady stepped back. Straightened.
"I know where he'll be tonight."

"Can't make tonight."

"Sunday?" Z nodded.

"When?" Nerves. A bad case.

Z thought it over. "Nine P.M." Little
Miss Jamie Stewart would have to hold off the ghosts on her own
Sunday night. At least until Z cleared up this ex-husband
case.

"He'll be in his own kind of 'safe'
house. In Gladstone. He doesn't realize I know the place, but I do.
And he'll be alone."

"OK. Got to think. A lot to do." What
Z was thinking was he'd have to take even more precautions than
usual. In the real world, pros beat amateurs -- seven days a week.
Z would have to be hooded. Use surprise. Hit fast. Hit hard. Hit
low.

"Don't tell anyone," the woman
whispered urgently. My husband's got ... contacts ... everywhere.
Even in the police."

Just another thing Z had to think
about. For starters, there weren't too many police in a small
suburban town like Gladstone. At the top -- even though Z didn't
like the ferret-faced captain -- Z had never suspected Scherer of
Mafia connections. Didn't suspect him now. As for the lesser
members of the department .... it was improbable that any were
important enough to be on the mob's payroll. Ditto for Liberty.
Ditto for Riverside. The lady was letting her paranoia get the
better of her.

"You'll call when it's ... over?" Fear
commanded the woman's face. Eyes wide. Mouth drawn at the
corners.

Z nodded. "Got a piece of
paper?"

Turning, she stumbled across the room
to get a sheet and a ballpoint pen from a sideboard drawer. Came
back; sagged down on the divan; put the paper on the coffee table;
leaned over to write.

"Both your phone and your husband's
address." She nodded, writing. Though Z had instant number memory,
no sense letting her knew that.

Folding the paper, she handed it to
Z.

"You'll hear from me."

Suddenly, tears were running down her
cheeks again. "I can't let you go without telling you the truth.
It's just that I need you so. When I found out I could hire you, it
was a Godsend. So ..."

"Tell me."

"Do you have a gun?" Brushing the
tears away.

"Sure." The Zapolska code let Z lie
for the purpose of relieving a client's mind.

"Because ... Sam's got a gun. Taped to
the inside of the door. He always does that."

Sam? ..... The boy's name was Sammy,
so Sam had to be ......

"He's brilliant and he's fast," the
lady continued hurriedly, her voice rising. "He shoots if there's
any doubt. That's what he says. And I believe him."

"No way he could know I'm coming. That
gives me an edge."

"Don't count on it. I don't know how
he finds out what he knows, but don't take a single chance. Have
your gun out when he opens the door. Remember, he'll shoot. He once
boasted he's the fastest gun alive."

"Good advice."

The woman nodded. Tried on a
pathetically brave smile.

And that was it.

At the door, all she said was a
whispered, "Please." Then closed the door behind him.

Outside, in what now seemed to be
depressingly bright light, Z walked as fast as possible past the
dog and down the walk.

Then hurried across the decaying
street to torture himself into his rotting car.

Quickly fumbling in his key, furiously
resuscitating the inert engine, Z flogged the car into drive and
set out on a quest for the Golden Corral on Oak, by this time,
desperate for the narcotic of a steak and some forgetfulness of
fries.

Even while trying to
outrun fear -- which was what he was doing -- some unladed ghost
was shadowing him. (In
addition
to the grinning death's head daring him to gamble
his life for small change.)

Was it the lady's house that was
haunting him? Was he bothered because it was ... too neat? Did he
think that, in her agitated state of mind, the place should have
looked ... neglected? Maybe. .... But he didn't think so. Women
sometimes turned to housework -- their natural occupation -- to
help them forget their troubles.

Could it be something about the house
number that was troubling him? ...... He didn't see how.

Or was it a stray thought about the
dog, the dog creeping out of its house to watch Z leave? (Z had
been so preoccupied that seeing the dog had hardly
registered.)

Thinking of dogs and the
detective business, Z remembered a Sherlock Holmes story that had
the dog
not
barking as the solution to the case.

Swinging around the far side of the
Bateman campus, headed home to Gladstone, he tried to remember what
he'd noticed about the dog.

Big dog. Shepherd mix. Big but ....
sick. Coat dull. Ribs showing. Eyes vacant. No growl; no
wag.

Looked like it was
starving.

Not a lady's dog. Poodle. Cocker.
Peek. Pomeranian.

The husband's dog, then? The
boy's?

If sick, why not have it at the
vet's?

Was it that the lady was too strapped
for cash to care for the animal, the dog now doomed to die because
its food money must be siphoned off to pay the woman's private
eye?

Headed for what had become
a
guilty
lunch,
all Z could think of was that hungry-looking dog.

* * * * *

A flash! Lightning!? Gunshot?! The
only sound ringing through the hollow house was Z's yell of
surprise.

Not a gunshot.

Z was fully awake, shaking in the
dark, his penlight making only the feeblest of attempts to
glow.

With Sunday's dawn on its way (it had
been another long, Saturday night at the ghost house.)

Z had gotten up to go to the bathroom,
on his return had been speared by the blinding, but silent, flash.
Now, he was just standing there.

Where?

What Z thought he'd been
about to do was enter the Ghost House bedroom in the hope of
slipping over to his side of the open sleeping bag without waking
the girl.
Certainly
without waking the girl! Another night of Jamie Stewart's
kind of loving had just about finished him.

"What are you doing there?" It was
Jamie's voice -- behind him -- Z swinging around to see her small
light at the end of the hall, nothing about her visible in the
total blackness back of the light.

"Just trying to get back to bed," he
said. "Back to sleep," he added hopefully.

"What are you doing down there, then?"
Down there? "The room's back this way."

Z tried to think -- which wasn't easy.
He'd never been at his best while lost in the dark, naked, talking
to a girl he couldn't see.

He'd gotten up, located the light
where he'd put it beside the far side of the mattress and slipped
out quietly to go to the bathroom.

On the way back .....

Then, it hit him. Instead of turning
left after he'd used the stool, he'd turned right; had wandered
into the wrong bedroom and tripped the infrared beam setting off
one of the cameras.

"I must have gotten lost," he
admitted.

"Well, come back to bed. We've got
another hour before sunrise. No sense wasting it."

Oh, no. Not again.

Shakily, Z reversed direction, still
sleepy but remembering to step outside the edge of the masking tape
track they'd made down the hall floor. (At least he'd had the
presence of mind to keep his bare feet out of the fluorescent
powder on his ill-fated, late-night trip to shake the dewdrop off
his lily.)

Backtracking, limping past the
bathroom door, dragging by the kitchen, Z arrived at the other
bedroom, the girl standing aside so he could enter.

Closing the door behind him, stepping
past him, Jamie turned to put her arms about his neck. Stretching
on tiptoe, she tilted back her angel face to kiss him with her
usual passion while wriggling against him chest-to-thigh with her
hot, naked body. .................

Nothing left. Drained dry.

Or it might be that the thought of
tomorrow night's "games" with the contract killer was having a
debilitating effect. (He'd already told Jamie not to expect him for
"ghost hunting" until late, Sunday night.)

As a way to distract himself from
tomorrow night's insanity, he'd decided to spend part of the day
checking out the "work-for-food" overpass for Ted.

Still holding her small flashlight (as
Z was hanging onto his,) Jamie untangled her arms and drew back,
flashing the light to see how she was doing.

Not well, apparently.

"Hmmm," she said, in her low register
purr, looking down at him again, shaking her blond head. "Not being
critical, but a girl likes to think she's attractive."

"You're that, all right,"
Z said, doing his best to stifle a deep sigh. After their
second
night, Z would
have traded sexy-looking, firm-breasted Jamie Stewart for a
pig-ugly woman who'd
bore
him back to sleep.

Letting him go, the girl turned to sit
on the edge of the mattress, motioning Z to sit beside
her.

Z sat -- not that he had much choice
in the matter, Z's Mother teaching him to defer to women -- gentle
flowers that they were. "Is that the way it is with Susan? Can't
get it up more than three or four times a night?" More of Jamie
Stewart's "gentle flower" talk.