“So stop these people,” Art said. “Whoever’s doing this, shut them down.”
Pritchard shook his head. “Active measures of that scope would expose us. Exposure would render us useless, Agent Jefferson. We often operate outside the bounds of the law, as our opposites do. We, however, do so benignly. But in the harsh light of judgment that would matter little.”
“So what the hell can you do?” Art asked.
Pritchard came to the doorway and added his eyes to those already playing over Simon’s back. “Allow us to take him.”
Art shook his head.
“To arrange for a new life for him,” Pritchard tried to explain, to convince. “We have made similar arrangements before for other innocents.”
“I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, mister,” Art declined firmly. “You come in here and tell me you’re with some kind of group that sounds like a bunch of wannabe superheroes, and tell me to give Simon to you. He’s not mine to give.”
“Then before long he won’t be yours at all,” Pritchard said.
Simon turned from the corner and approached Art, stopping when he saw the stranger’s feet very close to his friends’. His hand felt at the cards beneath his shirt.
Pritchard crouched down. “That’s a nice building you made.”
Simon twisted and said, “I was up on the chair.”
Pritchard stood again and looked to Art. “Will you walk me to the stairs?”
“Why?”
“He remembers what he hears, I presume. There is something I don’t think he should hear.”
Art thought it over, then walked Simon into the cramped kitchenette. “Simon, I have to walk with this man to the stairs. I’ll lock the door. You stay in here and don’t open it. Okay? Only I can open it. Got it?”
“Art can open the door,” Simon confirmed, in his own way.
Art patted him on the shoulder and led Pritchard into the hall, twisting the keys in the three locks.
“Which stairs?” Art asked.
“I’m parked in the alley,” Pritchard answered.
They walked down the hallway and turned where it ended at the rear of the building.
From the front of the building, Keiko Kimura turned onto the hallway and made her way toward 3B.
At the door she stopped and listened, both to the footsteps descending the far stairwell, and to scraping footsteps from inside the room. She wondered who the man was with Jefferson, but his relevance was minor, if consequential at all. They were gone, possibly for a minute, possibly for an hour. All she needed was a minute.
From her pocket she removed a small ring of three keys, which the building manager had willingly surrendered from his neatly arranged pegboard after Keiko cut his throat. No time for anything beyond that, and no desire. She inserted each key, undoing each lock, and opened the door to a shabby room. An empty room.
She closed the door and stepped further in, eyes searching the corners, ears picking up the shuffling feet to her left. There was an open door. Through it she saw what she had come for.
Her tongue slid past her lips and wet them with a slow stroke.
“Hey,” Keiko said, passing from the front room to the bedroom. The young American stood there, his feet nervously moving against the old wood floor, one finger touching a dresser where a building made of dominoes rose in tribute to its inspiration out the window. She closed on Simon and swung her hand at the miniature tower, scattering it into hundreds of pieces that clicked off the walls and the floor.
“You’re a stranger,” Simon said as he retreated to the window in the corner.
“No, I’m your friend,” Keiko said, reaching a hand with blue nails toward Simon. “And you’re coming with me.”
Pritchard stopped before exiting the stairwell on the ground floor and faced Art. “I want to give you a number you can call.”
“Why couldn’t you do this upstairs?”
“Our young friend having a phone number he should never have seen is how this all began.” Pritchard removed a card from his wallet and held it out so Art could see it. “Remember this number. Call it from any area code in the country. On the third ring press the number five.”
Art studied the number, committing it to memory, but he was not sure why.
Pritchard was more certain. “You will call it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because they’ll never stop looking.”
That statement clicked a switch in Art’s head. “Will they if you have him?”
Pritchard had no answer to that. At least they would not know where to look. But that was not a denial of Jefferson’s point. “Please don’t believe that you alone can save him.”
“I’m not that good,” Art said.
Pritchard wasn’t so sure that Jefferson didn’t believe it.
The nails dug into the shirtsleeves, and into his arm, and Simon’s head flopped back as another hand came over his mouth to staunch a scream.
“Shut up!” Keiko commanded, and grabbed for the window shade with the hand that covered Simon’s mouth, pulling it down. “Let’s go! Now!”
Simon resisted. This was a stranger. He was not supposed to leave. Only Art could open the door. Only Art could tell him to leave.
“Come on!” Keiko said harshly, tugging at the arm.
“You’re a stranger,” Simon repeated loudly, and pulled his arm free of the stranger’s grip. Her nails scratched him, and it hurt, and she reached with the other hand for his face.
“You’re coming, you little—”
Never go with a stranger. Simon knew that, and as her fingers touched his cheeks he tried to push them away. But they came back. He pushed them again. They came back.
“You’re a stranger!” Simon said very loud, and swung at the hands reaching for him, swung hard, swung and swung until his arms were flailing, and his fists clenching. “You’re a stranger!”
Keiko tried to snag one of the fists pecking at her like some annoying barnyard fowl, but when she did the other slipped through and crunched against her chin.
“You damn little—”
Simon felt the pain in his hand just before a sharper pain stung his face just like the time the man with the red hair had—
“Dumb little Joe!” Keiko swore as her hand pummeled Simon’s cheek a second time and knocked him to the floor.
In a building a hundred feet west, a woman pulled her face back from a spotting scope. “Did you catch that?”
Her partner, a man who might have passed for Pooks Underhill minus twenty years, nodded and kept his eyes on a small video screen, the image of the drawn shades yellow in the waning light. “Something is wrong.”
“Call him,” the woman suggested.
Pritchard was about to offer his hand to Art when his cell phone rang. He slid it open and listened, saying nothing, his eyes locking on Art’s after a moment. “Someone’s up there with Simon.”
“Who?” It could be Pooks, Art told himself. It could.
“A woman.”
“Dammit!” Art said, turning and bounding up the steps.
Pritchard closed his phone with an angry snap and resisted the urge to follow. He was out the door and to his car before Art reached the third floor.
“Come on!” Keiko prodded, urged, ordered, pleaded, as she pulled Simon into the front room by his arms, dragging the body that had become a defiant human tornado of arms and legs toward the front door.
She reached it and pulled it open and was knocked over as Art bolted into the room.
He tumbled over her, rolling toward the kitchenette, and she released her grip on Simon as she was smashed against the hard floor.