Keeping Watch (19 page)

Two hours later, the sun was low across the water when Allen let himself back in. He took a bottle of water from the fridge and unscrewed the cap as he passed through to the shower, stripping off his damp sweatshirt and throwing it in the general direction of the clothes hamper, kicking his battered running shoes into the closet, feeling aches from calves to wrists. Too long, he thought. Damn, you neglect your body for two minutes, it turns to mush on you. Although when he turned on the shower, he caught sight of himself in the long mirror, and looked over his naked body with critical approval.
Maybe not completely to mush,
he thought, sucking in his gut only a little.

The shower felt great on his skin, and he let it run hot onto the trembling muscles of his shoulders and haunches. He shaved in the shower, and scrubbed dry with one of the thick, scratchy towels Rae had brought him from Sweden last fall. His hands slowed at the thought of her, off in Switzerland, he thought it was, or had she reached Belgium by now? At any rate, she would be far away for the next three weeks, which was the only reason he'd consider going to Baja with Ed. Much as he loved the old bastard, Ed was a distant second to the marvelous woman who shared his life on Sanctuary.

And thinking of Ed, better call him and let him know the trip was on. Allen wrapped himself in the terrycloth robe that matched the towel, wadded the damp cloth over the towel rack, and went into the room that he'd set up as a study.

That's when he spotted the fax, patiently waiting in the machine's tray. He knew before he reached for it who it would be from, knew that his mind had conveniently set aside the
beep beep
in order to put off having to retrieve the thing.

“God damn it, Alice,” he said aloud, scowling in irritation at the white edge of paper.
I'm finished, I told her that. She agreed—I've gotten too old for this game. I'm as near as dammit to qualifying for Social Security, for Christ sake.

He picked up the paper from the fax machine's tray, and read the scribbled note.
How about lunch tomorrow?
it asked, without signature. In Alice's code, this actually meant dinner tonight, only it wouldn't be dinner, it would be a business meeting, and because it was a, let's see, Thursday, he even knew the place. Hell. For the first time in months, he became aware that he was craving a smoke, and pushed away the desire in irritation.

Maybe, he told himself, it would only be a review, or a distant proposal. Maybe she'd present him with an engraved plaque:
THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP.

Yeah, right. He'd better not call Ed until he talked to her.

She was there when he arrived at the restaurant. Looking at Alice, you might think she was some mid-rank executive, or a teacher in a private high school. She had medium length brown hair that looked short but could be made to look longer, and the only distinguishing thing about her face was the nose, which Allen knew had been broken twice but which had been set straight by experts. The other scars, the injuries physical and mental, did not show until you knew her well. She had invested her million-dollar settlement wisely.

She greeted Allen with more friendliness than she'd have shown if they'd been in private, getting up to kiss the air next to his cheek and patting the chair next to where she sat. An onlooker would catch a long-standing affection in her manner, as if they were old friends or even relatives. In truth, she trusted Allen only slightly more than she did most men, and regarded him as a useful instrument in her cause, as replaceable as a laptop or a camera.

The waiter poured him a glass of the white wine sitting in the tabletop cooler, and they made a show of studying the menus before calling the young man back. When their salads were in front of them and the topics of weather and politics had been disposed of, she said without preamble, “There's another case come up, if you're interested.”

Only if we can finish in three weeks,
Allen thought. The apparent lack of concern was typical of her. When they'd begun to work together nearly ten years before, he cautiously allying his one-man operation with her only slightly larger organization, she'd made it seem as if she was doing him a favor, allowing him to help with one of her rescues; now, at least, she'd graduated to a demonstration of indifference over whether he took it or not.

He wasn't fooled. “Alice, I'm retired. Besides which, I made plans to go away for a couple of weeks.”

“If you want,” she said, cool as always. “I wasn't sure you meant it.”

You knew damn well I meant it,
he thought, then asked aloud (as she no doubt knew he would), “What have you got?”

“I'll forward you the email. The terminal it came from is in a public library, but the letter looks genuine. A twelve-year-old boy.”

“Parent?”

“Father's the problem. Mother's dead.”

Problem,
Allen reflected, was a word loaded with reverberations. Especially the way Alice said it.

“Isn't there someone else who can take it?” Alice had a number of women who did the same thing he did, some of whom he had worked with, others whose existence he merely inferred.

She just shrugged, a ladylike gesture packed with disdain. God, she pissed him off sometimes. “How the hell did I ever get involved with you, anyway?” he said petulantly, startling the waiter, who was about to remove his plate.

She met his eyes for the first time that evening. The demure smile she gave him was a wicked thing, holding more mischief than Ed got into in a year; Allen shook his head in admiration, and in surrender. “Okay, but this really has to be the last one.”

The rest of the meal passed in conversation about nothing.

Afterward, they parted at the door with another air kiss. Allen went straight home and booted up his computer. He poured himself a small Scotch, then settled down to read about Alice's twelve-year-old problem boy.

Chapter 17

The boy with the undependable cloak of invisibility he called
The Quiet
thought of himself as Jamie. No one else used that name: At school he was Jim or James (if you were a teacher) or Jam, Jerk, or J-Bo (if you were another student). At home he was nameless when things were good or, when things were looking grim,
Jameson,
or even
Son
. Only his mother had called him Jamie, and she was long gone.

Jameson Patrick O'Connell had been born twelve years earlier to a mother who loved him with all her heart, as much as she loved life itself, as much as she feared his father, almost. He came thirty-eight days before his mother's due date, a tiny premature infant of less than five pounds. Despite his size, his thin-boned mother had a hard labor, and the doctor had been on the edge of calling for a cesarean when the black-haired skull finally crowned and the tiny squalling thing slipped reluctantly from the hot comfort of his mother's womb.

It was almost as if Jamie knew already, before he'd so much as drunk a breath of air with his underdeveloped lungs, that the comforts of life in the open would be few and far between. He lay in the plastic-sided, artificially heated, overly lit ICU nursery for the better part of a month while his mother's milk first came in, then dried up, and his father studied the enormous and ever-mounting bills in disbelief, vowing revenge on the insurance agent who had sold him the inadequate policy, the hospital that hadn't had the guts to let such an obviously defective infant die, and the wife who had borne him this feeble excuse for a son. He had seen the thing once, two days after the birth; gazed for thirty appalled seconds at the hairless kitten with tubes running in and out and bandages across its eyes, and left the hospital. A son was a thing to be proud of, not this half-formed lump that hadn't even the strength to yell.

That remained his attitude for the next dozen years of the boy's life. Someday, the man knew, a lot of his business would rest on this miserable creature; in the meantime, he alternated between ignoring it and teaching it the discipline and skills it would need if it grew to manhood. Mostly, he was happy enough for it to keep out of his way.

Jamie sometimes wondered what would have become of him had he been born before the days of computers. The mere thought was enough to give him the cold sweats, as if he had conjured up a nightmare creature, gripping an ice pick in its paw, that loomed over his head and threatened to put out his eyes and his ears at the same time. He could not imagine living without the screen that linked him to—everything. To the soothing rhythms of the game worlds with their crisp boundaries and electronic gore; to the Web where he harassed and teased; to the chat rooms where, every so often, he felt the honest touch of other minds. Of course, when he did that, he usually dropped out of the room. He didn't mind chatting with other gamers, but the heart-to-heart stuff made him uncomfortable. Plenty of time for relationships when he was older, he figured. For now, mastery was more than enough.

For some unknown and not-to-be-considered reason, computer equipment was the one thing Father did not begrudge him. It was funny, because Father was no techno-whiz. In fact, it never seemed to occur to Father that the computer was a way out for the boy, the one place in his entire life where he was free from the heavy paternal hand. Jamie knew with bone-deep instinct that when it finally dawned on Father that the computer was far more than a glorified encyclopedia-cum-typewriter for schoolwork, on that day the plug would be pulled, and Jamie would be isolated for good. But in the meantime, somehow Jamie always had as much power at his command as a boy could want. More than some professional programmers, in fact. Hardware, software, phone lines, DSL, satellite connections, you name it, it dropped into Jamie's lap. He could barely wait until he was old enough to quit school, which was a complete waste of time and a constant horror socially. He only knew three kids he might, sometimes, privately acknowledge as friends, and one of those was gay, one was fat, and one was a girl. God help him if he hung out with any of them publicly. Mostly he talked with them online.

The one thing that made life bearable was his ability to get by without a whole lot of sleep. Other kids his age seemed to sleep all the time, which cut severely into their nighttime gaming hours, but Jamie's otherwise unsatisfactory little frame chugged along quite happily on five or six hours' sleep a night, less when something good was happening.

This inevitably meant that most of the online friendships he had forged were with older people, college kids mostly, and he had learned to talk the talk. He doubted any of them guessed that Masterman or RageDaemon or any of his other characters disguised a runty kid. He was great at shooting the breeze, could shoot back jokes about sex and drugs with the best of them.

The only people he wasn't sure what to do with were the creeps. They would first appear on one of the games or a chat room, but it wouldn't be long before they were trying to get you aside for a personal talk. The first few times Jamie had realized what was happening, he had shut them off in disgust, and been left feeling creepy himself. After a while, he got to spot them early, and confront them. This had the effect of making them slink away into less threatening territory, but left Jamie wishing he had someone to crow to about the victory. Last month he'd had a really good time hunting one of the creeps down, hounding his steps online and even hacking in to a couple of accounts and finding out who the guy actually was, then sending him (this, Jamie thought, was real genius) fawning but anonymous letters, with explicit language and a couple of pictures he'd picked up from a porno site—at the creep's work address. The guy had gone silent right after that; Jamie kept checking for his name online, wondering if he'd been arrested yet.

It had been shortly after his tenth birthday (uncelebrated in any traditional sense of the word, although it had not gone unremarked in the O'Connell household) that Jamie had realized the Web could be manipulated. Oh, he'd known for a long time that the names populating the Internet were just people, with all the undependability and quirkiness of their fleshly counterparts, but not until he turned ten did it dawn on him that even a weak little kid like himself could become a force within the vast electronic realm of the Internet.

That was when he began to reach out, as the saying went, to touch someone, and pretended to be an authority on some bit of stupidity one of the chat rooms was discussing, he couldn't even remember now what it was. But it had been fun, composing an opinion that sounded good and fooled the other jerks blathering away, had made him feel superior, even powerful. The day one of his invented “facts”—a technical-sounding piece about how the government was causing hurricanes over Cuba to become more devastating—came full circle and was deposited, scarcely changed, into one of his mailboxes, was a day of revelation and triumph. At home he was less than a piece of toilet paper stuck to his father's shoe; on the Web, he was an Authority.

On his eleventh birthday (an anniversary still too recent for Jamie to think of with any equanimity) the boy had been hit by (among other things) a revelation. The Web was good for a joke, but it could also be used as a tool. Or rather, the people on it could be used and manipulated to get himself out of this increasingly hazardous place.

Because the truth was, Jamie loved his father, but he also knew that if he didn't get away, one of these days Father was going to kill him.

Chapter 18

Allen knew none of this about the boy, not for a long time. The first of Alice's forwarded emails read simply:

my mother's dead. my father hurts me

soemtimes I want to die too

deadboy

The fourteen words touched Allen's senses like water on a dry sponge, expanding them, leaving them thirsty for more. A boy, Alice had said—taking the signature at face value, or was she seeing behind the lines on the screen? Allen, too, heard nuances: rage twisted into self-contempt, the writer's disgust for his own weaknesses.
deadboy
was a personality with these first three declarative sentences, but how much of that was Allen's experience, and how much a projection of himself? The message had come, according to Alice, from a public library in San Jose, California, using a Yahoo account with the name
deadboy
. The letter had originally been sent in early March, but it floated around for eleven days, washing in and out on the electronic tides like a note in a bottle (and, Allen thought, no doubt causing a flurry of responses, ranging from the sympathetic replies of eager pedophiles to abusive notes from pull-the-wings-off-flies cynics) until eventually it was forwarded to a woman widely known as an advocate for children's rights. She sent it on to Alice, phoning her about it the next day. Alice had already sent
deadboy
her own equally brief reply:

You sound like you have a plate full of trouble.

Do you want help?

A., mother of two

When the woman called, Alice had yet to receive an answer. If none came in four or five days, she told her friend, she would try again, using another address and taking a different tack from the maternal, which they both knew might only have served to frighten the boy off.

However, three days later an answer came:

you cant do anything. Its my problem.

db

Allen, reading Alice's reply, couldn't fault it. Give the woman her due: Prickly as she might be with adults, particularly adult males, she was great with kids. She sent a matter-of-fact paragraph, the bottom line of which was that despite what the boy knew about life, there were adults who were in a position to help kids, and although she did not expect
deadboy
to trust her, he seemed bright enough to be able to use her. Eventually she would need to ask his name, but for now, maybe he could just tell her what was going on?

A week went by before the boy responded. Allen could imagine Alice's growing anxiety, her imaginary images of the correspondence discovered, of a violent episode that left him unable to get to the library, of the thousand things an angry adult could do to a child. But he did answer.

why should I trust you?

db

She wrote:

You shouldn't, not yet. I could be a 40-year-old man just getting kicks. Tell me whatever you're comfortable with.

A.

He shot back:

what the hell, *I* could be a 40 yr old pervret. tell me about yr kids

db

Allen, reading this nearly a month after it had appeared on Alice's screen, laughed aloud. The kid was quick, all right—plus, he had a sense of humor, a rarity among the abused. And to top it off, the first thing he'd done was turn the conversation around on Alice. Smiling with admiration, Allen read on.

My daughter teaches history in Oregon. My son was killed by his father fifteen years ago. This may explain my interest in your email.

A.

whats your daugther's name?

db

Sorry, can't tell you that.

A.

I think yr bullshiting me. you never had a son

db

(Actually, Allen knew, this was true: Alice's dead child had been a girl, twin to the surviving daughter whose injuries had not only left her well qualified for her job teaching in a school for the blind, but had also plunged her mother into the peculiar life of a professional kidnapper. A certain amount of obfuscation was necessary.)

I'm glad you're skeptical about what people tell you over the Internet [Alice wrote back] and you're right, there's no way I can prove anything this way. But that's not the point. I thought you had a problem you wanted some help with?

A.

I never said that

db

No you didn't. So, DO you have a problem you want help with, or were you just bullshitting me about your father hurting you and your mother being dead?

A.

Allen winced when he read this, and wondered where Alice was going with this. It didn't do to get confrontational with a kid, not when it was so easy for him to just vanish. But somehow she'd known this would not drive him off. After a delay of four days (two of which were a weekend, on which days the boy never wrote), an answer from
deadboy
came.

I told you, nodoby can help me, its my problem

db

Alice shot back:

You wouldn't try to build a house without a hammer and saw, would you? You wouldn't get on a plane without a trained pilot, would you? I help people who need help. It's what I do. Use me.

A.

At this point in his reading, Allen got up from the terminal and went to make himself some coffee, more as a means of defusing his apprehension than because he needed any more caffeine. Was Alice losing it? Alice the cool, Alice the analytical, putting down there on an email for the world to read (her computer email might be securely encrypted, but the boy's in the library was most certainly not) the stark fact that she helped people, such as young boys who needed to disappear. His immediate impulse was to pack his things and leave town before she slipped so badly that she slipped him straight into a jail cell.

He'd glimpsed this vulnerability in her once or twice before, whenever mention of suicide came up. This, he imagined, was because her dead daughter had only indirectly been killed by Alice's ex-husband; the girl had, in the end, finished the man's job herself.

Apprehension not in the least assuaged by his actions in the kitchen, he went back to the study. There he found that, indeed, Alice's risk of exposure had done the trick, that the boy seemed to relax under the idea that he was in control of his fate, that Alice was nothing more than a tool for him to use. Over the course of the next two weeks, their dialogue slowly spiraled in on the facts, the kid's town (on the outskirts of San Jose) and what he liked in school (math mostly, and he secretly enjoyed chess club although it was only for geeks), that his mother's parents lived in Chicago although he hadn't been allowed to talk to them since his mother had died when he was seven, and that he was only allowed to bike to the library because it was on his way home, and the housekeeper thought he was doing research for a school project.

It was here that Alice had turned the file over to Allen. Allen slept on it, and the next morning picked up the phone to book a seat on the next available flight to San Jose.

He arrived in San Jose shortly after noon on the first Friday in May. He hired a car at the airport and drove west a few miles on the freeway; the exit he took set him down in a sprawl of suburban development, cheap houses from the Sixties alternating with clots of Eighties apartments and brand-new condominiums. He had maps, a lot of good maps, and found the library without difficulty. Pulling the rental car into the back of the parking lot, he put on a respectable but well-used mechanic's jacket with the name “Bill” embroidered over the pocket, massaged a thin layer of grime under and around his nails, ran his hands through his hair to rumple it, slid on the heavy glasses he'd brought, and touched his bushy moustache to make sure the glue was holding. He then locked the car and went inside.

He found the auto repair section and pulled out a couple of technical manuals, setting them down on a table with a clear view of the main door and the computer lab, then began making notes with a chewed pencil stub on some creased pieces of paper he took from his jeans pocket. He looked like a mechanic with an engine problem knotty enough to send him to the library, and he did work his way through the electrical section of the first book with some attention: A person never knew when he'd have to disable a 1995 Honda.

At two-thirty the first kids started to appear, high-school students with a short day and young children accompanied by the parents who had picked them up from school. The middle-school students didn't start coming until after three. Allen leaned back in his chair, crooked glasses propped on the end of his nose, and continued reading until he spotted his first solitary boy at three-twenty.

Color in the kid's cheeks hinted that he'd come on his bike rather than a car, and the way he walked straight past all the tables showed that he wasn't here to meet someone.

But even without these slim clues, even if Allen hadn't been looking for him, even if he hadn't arrived just at the time during
deadboy
was usually online, Allen would have known at a glance that this was a kid who knew what fists felt like. He couldn't always tell—some kids had such powerful repression mechanisms, they managed to forget the abuse themselves between episodes. But
deadboy
—and Allen was pretty sure this was him—was one of those who tried to make himself small.

He wasn't very large to begin with. In one of his emails, he'd claimed he was twelve, and although at first glance the boy looked more like ten, a closer look revealed the first gawky signs of approaching adolescence. His dark hair had needed cutting a week ago, his thin cheeks and surprisingly full lips had been reddened by the wind, providing contrast to the nearly black eyes framed with long lashes. The boy's narrow shoulders were inside a jacket that was a bit too light for the weather and a bit too short in the sleeves, but which when new had cost someone a few dollars. He was unexpectedly beautiful, in the way boys are before the muscle- and hair-building hormones of puberty shape them into men. The beauty would be a problem, Allen thought. It was easier when a kid had a chunky body and a face like the hind end of a pig: Nobody seeing the photograph of such a child would automatically think,
Pedophile,
and call to mind the middle-aged man they'd noticed hanging around. Hell, watching this boy made Allen
feel
like a pedophile, eyeing his target over the top of a car repair manual.

The boy eased his heavy backpack onto one of the tables and walked over to the nearest shelf. He made a show of choosing a book from the American History section, leaning up against the shelves to survey the room out from under his eyelids, in much the same way that Allen was watching him. Then on the dot of three-thirty he walked back to the table, dropped the book next to his pack, and went to the glassed-in room with its bank of computers. There he nodded in response to the greeting of a gray-haired woman who was tidying up and setting out stacks of scrap paper. He signed in to the book on the desk near the door, and sat down at a monitor. In moments, the boy was blind to the world.

Allen figured that the library allotted its computers in one-hour time slots, which gave him plenty of time to check out the kid. Ten minutes into the hour, Allen closed his manual, folded the notes into his back pocket, and returned the two repair manuals to the shelf. The magazine stacks were on the opposite side of the room, so he walked in that direction. As he passed the table, he glanced down at the book the kid had taken as decoy, then stopped dead, peered around as if hoping to spot the patron whose volume this was, then shrugged and pulled the book over. He thumbed through the index, paged back through it to page 279 and read a paragraph about the New Deal before abandoning the book, taking care to shove it back more or less where he'd found it. Over in the magazine stacks, he pulled out his scraps of paper to write down what he'd read on the ID tag hanging from the kid's backpack—no name, but something almost as informative: a phone number.

He wandered over to the New Fiction display, picking out a thick volume to cover his surveillance through the lab windows. The boy seemed to be writing a paper, his fingers moving rapidly over the keys, but slowing laboriously when time came to squint at the screen and make corrections on what he'd written. It took him half an hour to write his two pages, and when he'd retrieved his assignment from the printer and his disk from the machine, he settled down with evident relief, and logged on. His fingers flew, now that spelling and punctuation didn't matter; Allen wished he had some way of tracing what the kid was saying and who he was saying it to, but short of taking up a position behind his back or staring through the crowded library with a pair of binoculars, he didn't see how he'd manage.

Before the hour was up, Allen retreated into the gardening and cooking section, sampling a number of cookbooks before he spotted the kid coming out of the computer center. He moved straight for his backpack to swing it over his shoulder before heading rapidly for the exit, solitary all the way. Allen let him go. Better to risk losing the kid than to show himself too early.

When the boy was safely out the door, Allen gathered his papers, rambling over to give the computer room a once-over, just happening to glance at the sign-in sheet. The signature began with the letter J, but after that, it could have been anything. Back at the main desk, he asked for a library card application and said to the gray-haired librarian he'd seen laying out scratch paper in the computer room, “Was that by any chance Mike Flannery's son? That skinny kid who just left?”

The trusting woman followed the direction of his eyes toward the automatic doors, then smiled at him. “You mean James? No, his name isn't Flannery, it's O'Connor—no, O'Connell, that's right.”

“That's funny, the kid's a spitting image of a guy I used to know when I worked for a software company, three, four years ago. After it went belly-up, we sort of lost touch. Maybe fate's telling me it's time to look Mike up again. You need a letter, as ID, you say?” he asked, diverting her attention back to library business.

“Anything that's been delivered by the post office within the past thirty days, as proof of address,” she repeated patiently. He thanked her and went out, frowning over the application card as if it were his SAT exam.