The first and most nerve-racking part of this job was a quick trip over to the Hudson waterfront to see if anybody’d noticed a struggle going on that morning or if any bodies’d been spotted in the water. I talked to a few gangs of longshoremen as I worked my way down as far as the Cunard pier, but none of them’d heard of any trouble. I even ran into my old pal Nosy, who was, as usual, poking around in the midst of all the early morning debarking and unloading what was going on, and he likewise said he hadn’t seen Kat nor heard about any violence on the waterfront. This news, like the information I’d gotten from Betty, had the effect of both reassuring me and making me even more nervous about where Kat could’ve gone or what she might be doing. More than anything else, one question stuck in my head: Why had Libby Hatch been willing to let Kat walk away, instead of insisting that she share the fate what’d befallen the poor, dumb guard Henry, and maybe Mr. Picton, too? Of all Libby’s many complicated characteristics, mercy didn’t seem one what made an appearance all that often, especially not where her own safety and schemes were concerned. Why had she let Kat go?
Working my way downtown and through my old neighborhood, stopping in at half a dozen other kid dives what weren’t much different from Frankie’s, I continued to find no trace of Kat. Hickie was over at the Fulton Fish Market, cramming a morning swim in before the coming storm unloaded on the city, and he told me that he’d been working a string of houses on the West Side with a collection of our old pals the night before. They hadn’t made their way home ’til early in the morning, and they’d stopped off for a few pails of beer at a dive on Bleecker Street on their way. But he, too, hadn’t seen or heard anything of Kat, a fact what seemed to be cause for hope: if something had happened to her, word would’ve gotten around our circuit pretty fast. But where in the hell was the girl?
Another swing past Frankie’s (where the Italian kid I’d laid out was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen) finally gave me the beginnings of an answer: when Betty’d gotten back from giving me a hand at the Dusters’, she’d found Kat waiting for her. Kat had, it seemed, been feeling very poorly, which was why she’d left off watching the Dusters’ place: a severe pain in her stomach and gut had struck her, a mysterious ailment what neither she nor Betty could identify or ease. On hearing that I was back in town, Kat’d decided to head on up to the Doctor’s house and wait for me, since, as she’d told Betty, I could lay hands on some medicine what was especially useful for the kind of trouble she was in (meaning the Doctor’s supply of paregoric). Betty’d wanted to go with Kat, who was starting to vomit pretty violently by the time she left; but Frankie was still angry at her for leaving that morning, and so Kat’d had to set out on her own, and was probably at Seventeenth Street now.
I ran back over toward City Hall Park to hire a cab, picturing in my mind Kat all huddled up where she’d hidden once before, in among the hedges what ran along the border of the Doctor’s front yard. She’d looked pretty awful then, and what with Betty’s strange report I didn’t expect her to appear much better when I found her this time: her sudden exit from the Dusters’ probably indicated another lack of burny, from which she was now feeling the effects. We’d have to repeat the treatment what’d helped her the last time around, though it would cost me another lecture from the Doctor; but at least I’d be able to help her once I got her into the house.
I found her just where I’d figured to, balled up like a newborn kitten in among the greenery to the side of the front yard, wearing the dress she always did in summer: an old, light job that showed off the curves what were still forming in her young body. She was asleep, clutching her bag tight to her stomach and breathing in quick little gasps. There were a couple of pools of vomit-really not much more than bile, given that she’d been retching for so long-lying on the ground behind her curled back, and her face was the color of old ashes. Big charcoal-colored circles had formed under her eyes, and as I took her hand I noted that her fingernails were starting to turn a strange and disturbing sort of color, like they’d been stepped on.
Even I could see that she was much sicker than she’d been last time.
As I wiped a few sweat-drenched strands of blond hair out of Kat’s face, I noted that her skin was strangely cool to the touch; and when I tried to get her to wake up, it took a good minute of gently slapping her palms and calling her name to do the job. As soon as she started to come around she grabbed at her gut especially hard, then retched again, bringing up nothing at all this time. Her head swaying as I helped her to sit up, she seemed to have trouble focusing her blue eyes.
“Stevie…” she breathed, falling against my chest. “Oh, God, I’ve got a awful pain in my gut…”
“I know,” I said, trying to pull her up so’s I could get her inside. “Betty told me. How long you been without the burny, Kat?”
She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t but a little. “It ain’t that. I’ve got a whole tin of the stuff, and I been blowing it all morning. This is something else…” As she stood up, the pain in her midsection seemed to ease a little bit, and she looked up to really see my face for the first time. “Well,” she whispered, with a small smile, “I ain’t generally at my best when we see each other, am I?”
I smiled back at her as best I could, and brushed some more hair out of her face. “You’ll be fine. Just got to get you inside and fixed up.”
She tightened her grip on my shirt, looking very worried and maybe a little ashamed. “I tried, Stevie-I told your friend Mr. Moore I’d look out for the kid, and I really did try, but the pain got so bad-”
“It’s okay, Kat,” I said, holding on to her tighter. “You done good-we got somebody else watching the place now. Somebody Libby won’t be able to get away from.”
“Yeah, but will he be able to get away from her, Stevie?” Kat said hoarsely.
“Won’t need to,” I answered. “This mug’s different, Kat-he can match her play for play.”
Nodding and then stumbling a little as I pulled her toward the front door, Kat tried to swallow: an action what appeared to give her a lot of difficulty. “He must be good, then,” she said, coughing some. “ ’Cause I’ll tell you, Stevie-that woman is the end of the damned world…”
Taking out my key, I opened the front door and guided Kat into the warm, stale air of the house. Just as soon as we’d reached the bottom of the staircase, she doubled over again, vomiting up some yellow bile and then screaming once in agony. But the shrieking itself seemed to call for more strength than she had, and as she fell out of my arms to sit on one of the stairs she just began to weep quietly.
“Stevie,” she managed to say, as I sat next to her and held her tight, “I know you ain’t supposed to, and I don’t want you to get in no trouble-”
I’d forgotten all about the paregoric. “Right,” I said, leaning her against the stairway wall and then standing up to head for the Doctor’s consulting room. “You wait here, I’ll get the stuff.”
As I tried to move down the hall, I felt her clinging to one of my hands, like if she let go I might never come back. Turning around, I saw tears still streaming down her terribly pale face. She was staring at me in a way what sort of seemed like she’d never really seen me before. “I ain’t never deserved your being so good to me,” she whispered; and something in the words made me rush back to her for a second and hold her as tight as I thought she could stand.