“Daddy!” Victoria protested.
“I’ll ask my supervisor,” said the assistant. She left the word asshole unspoken.
Ten minutes later they left the designer denim department. Victoria said, “Daddy — sometimes you can be so-o-o embarrassing.”
“Two r’s and two s’s — right? But I got us a seven-fifty discount, didn’t I?”
They had almost reached the Race Street bridge leading back to Tower Place Mall when Trevor heard someone hurrying up behind them. Without warning, a heavily built man pushed between them, almost knocking Victoria sideways.
Trevor shouted, “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” But the man kept on storming toward the bridge — at least until he reached it, when he suddenly stopped.
There were at least twenty people crossing the bridge, including six or seven children of various ages. Trevor witnessed what happened next, but he could hardly believe it was real.
Another heavily built man had appeared at the opposite end of the bridge. Trevor saw that he was wearing a black suit and a red shirt, and he had close-cropped, brushlike hair. But it was his face that alarmed Trevor the most. It was practically scarlet, with narrow black eyes and a thin black gash for a mouth.
The second man crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them, pulling two enormous triangular knives out of his coat. The first man did the same. The knives made a sliding, metallic sound, and they flashed brightly as the men held them up over their heads. A woman shopper screamed, twice, and a man shouted, “What the hell? What?”
The two men started to walk toward each other, making stabbing gestures in the air. The bridge was only a hundred feet long, if that, and the shoppers and their children were caught in between them. Some of them rushed to the windows and started to bang on the glass, trying to attract the attention of the car drivers who were passing beneath them. Others started crying out and huddling together.
They stood no chance at all. The two men bore down on them from either end of the bridge, chopping at them with such ferocity that Trevor saw fingers flying through the air. There was blood everywhere, a blizzard of blood. It spattered the windows and splashed across the skywalk in long arterial loops. The shoppers dropped to their knees, their hands covering their heads to protect themselves, but the two men continued to stab them, piercing their hands and their arms and their shoulders and their backs.
Nobody shouted or screamed. Instead, they whimpered, like animals. And all the time the knives flashed up and the knives flashed down, and there was the chih! chih! chih! sound of constant stabbing.
Trevor seized Victoria’s sleeve and yanked her close to him. He dragged her backward into a rail of summer coats, so that they toppled over, and were buried. Victoria was gasping, “They’re killing them, Daddy! All those poor people! They’re killing them!”
Trevor was rummaging through his pockets for his cell. “Ssh!” he told her. “Don’t you move! Don’t you make a sound!”
“But they’re killing them!” she protested. She tried to sit up, but Trevor pulled her back down again, under the coats.
“What are we going to do?” said Victoria. “Supposing they come looking for us?”
Trevor punched out 911. “Police? There’s another stabbing attack in progress. Right now, yes! The skywalk bridge over Race Street, between Saks and Tower Place Mall. Send somebody fast as you can!”
“May I have your name, sir?” asked the police operator.
Trevor snapped his cell phone shut, and then climbed up onto his hands and knees. “You ready to make a run for it?” he asked Victoria.
Victoria, half hidden under a pink flowery coat, gave him a nod.
“Okay, then, let’s make a run for it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Summoning
Molly gave Victoria half a Versed tablet to calm her down, and put her to bed. Trevor chose a double Jack Daniel’s instead of a sedative, and Sissy joined him.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said, as he hunched in his armchair in the living room. “It was like a horror movie. There was so much — blood.”
They had already seen on the news that seventeen men, women, and children had been fatally injured on the Race Street skywalk. The attack had lasted a little less than three and a half minutes, but between them, the victims had been stabbed three hundred and twenty-four times.
The two men who had perpetrated the attacks fitted the descriptions of Red Mask — or at least two out of the three Red Masks. Witnesses at both ends of the bridge had seen them rushing toward the skywalk before the attack took place, but nobody had seen how or where they had gone afterward.
“We are urgently appealing to anybody who might have seen these men leaving the scene of the stabbings,” said Lieutenant Kenneth Moynihan of the homicide unit on the news. “So far, we have no idea how they managed to make their escape without a single person noticing them. We don’t know if they went through the mall or out through one of the department stores, or made their way along the skywalk. They could have had a getaway vehicle parked in the Fountain Square Garage, but none of the attendants there saw anybody who matches their description.”
Trevor switched the sound off. “Do you have any idea?” he asked Sissy.
“I do. But do you really want me to tell you?”
“Momma, for better or for worse, I saw those two Red Masks today. I saw them with my own eyes, and I saw what they can do. My God, if I hadn’t had a run-in with the girl in the denim department, Victoria and I could easily have been on that skywalk, too.”
“Well, I thank whatever fates there are for that.”
“So? How do you think they got away?”
Sissy sipped her whiskey. “You saw those roses yesterday evening. One minute they were three-dimensional, and real. The next, they were only two-dimensional — nothing but drawings.”
“And what does that tell me?”
“Roses are roses. Roses don’t have intelligence, or choice. Roses can’t make decisions. But men can. I’m beginning to think that those two Red Masks have the ability to choose when they want to be real and when they want to be drawings. A man can be traced, but a drawing can hide anywhere — on a wall, on a sheet of paper — just waiting for the time when he wants to turn himself back into a man again.”
Trevor said, “I find it so goddamned hard to get my head around all of this. Surely there must be some other explanation.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Maybe it’s some kind of a conjuring trick. You know, like Harry Houdini. He could make himself disappear, couldn’t he? And he wasn’t a drawing.”
Sissy laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all in the cards, Trevor. The cards show an image that comes to life. It’s just like those killings that happened this morning. The cards predicted them, but I didn’t understand what they were trying to say to me.”
She took out l’Avertissement and handed it to him. “Look here. A bridge, with a man warning people not to walk across it. Red roses, entwined on the railings. but they’re not red roses at all, they’re hands, covered in blood. Seventeen of them, if you count. Adult hands, children’s hands. One for every person who was killed today.”
Trevor said, “That could be a coincidence.”
“It could be, yes. Except for the five magpies, which stand for the month of May, and for the two crosses on the hill. Diagonal crosses, two Xs. And what’s the date today? May twentieth. Roman numerals, XX for twenty. Not only that. look at the two men nailed to the crosses. They both have red hair and red faces.”