Still dazed by a lack of sleep and the shocks of the last twenty-four hours, I just sat on the edge of the Doctor’s bed as I listened to all this, staring at Kat’s strangely peaceful face and waiting for a couple of men from the city morgue to come and take her body away. The others-excepting Marcus, who’d gone straight from Grand Central to Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street to explain to his bosses that a fugitive was loose in the city-quietly moved around the house, talking among themselves about what should be done next and knowing that it would be best not to say anything to me until I came out of the horrible fog I was in.
This didn’t even start to happen until I heard the sound of the van from the morgue arriving outside. When the two attendants who were driving it entered the house, I began to realize for the first time that they were going to take Kat away, and that the face what, dead or no, still lay in front of me would soon be gone from my sight forever. There wasn’t any way to stop it, I knew that; but in my continued state of confusion I found that what I needed most was some way to say the good-bye what Libby Hatch had robbed me of. Glancing feverishly around the room, my eyes settled on Kat’s worn old bag. I snatched the thing up, praying that it contained the few items in the world what she actually cared about-her dead father’s wallet, her dead mother’s picture, and her train ticket to California-and thanking God when I found that it did. I told the Doctor that we couldn’t let the city plant Kat in any potter’s field without those things, but he told me not to worry, that he’d arrange for her to have a decent burial out in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
The sound of the word “burial” cut through the last of the strange haze I’d been drifting through ever since waking up, and a pronounced lump began to grow in my throat. Running out to the morgue van in the rain what’d finally started to fall, I stopped the two attendants as they were loading Kat’s body in, then pulled back the sheet what covered her. Touching her cold face one last time, I leaned down to whisper into her dead ear:
“Not maybe, Kat-I did. I do …”
Then I slowly pulled the sheet back up, and stepped back to let the two attendants go about their business. As I watched the van pull away from the house, cold, clear reality swept over me in a terrible wave, one so powerful that when I turned to see Miss Howard standing inside the front door, giving me a look what said she knew just how much Kat’d meant to me and how I was feeling, I couldn’t help but run over, bury my face in her dress, and let myself have at least a couple of minutes of tears.
“She did try, Stevie,” Miss Howard whispered, putting her arms around my shoulders. “In the end she tried very hard.”
“Couldn’t beat the odds, though,” I managed to mumble through my grief.
“There were no odds to beat,” Miss Howard answered. “The game was rigged against her. From the very start…”
I nodded, sniffling away as much sorrow as I could. “I know,” I said.
The Doctor, having seen the van out of sight, walked through the front yard to join us. “Life did not offer her many chances,” he said quietly, standing by us and looking out the open door. “But it was not life, finally, that took her last chance away. Left to her own devices, she might have escaped all that she’d known here, Stevie.” He put a hand to my head. “That knowledge must be foremost in your thoughts, in the days to come.”
Nodding again, I wiped at my face and tried to get myself pulled together; then a thought entered my head, one what’d been shoved aside by all the turmoil of Kat’s death. “What about Mr. Picton?” I asked. “Is he-?”
“Dead,” the Doctor answered, plainly but gently. “He died where we found him-the loss of blood was simply too great.”
I suddenly felt like the ground underneath me was just melting away. “Oh, God…” I moaned; then I slid down the wall to the floor, grabbing at my forehead with one hand and quietly crying again. “Why? What the hell is all this for …?”
The Doctor crouched down in front of me. “Stevie,” he said, his own eyes red around their black cores, “you grew up in a world where people robbed for money, killed for advantage or out of rage, assaulted to satisfy lust-a world where crime seemed to make some terrible sort of sense. And this woman’s actions seem very different to you. But they aren’t. It is all a result of perception. A man rapes because he sees no other way to satisfy an urgent, terrible need. Libby kills because she sees no other way to reach goals that are as vital to her as the very air she breathes, and were planted in her mind when she was too young to know what was taking place. She, like the rapist, is wrong, horrifically wrong, and it is our job-yours, mine, Sara’s, all of ours-to understand the perceptions that lead to such misbegotten actions, so that we may have some hope of keeping others from being enslaved by them.” Reaching out to touch my knee, the Doctor looked into my eyes with an expression what showed all the pain he’d felt when his beloved Mary Palmer had died just steps from where I was sitting. “You have lost someone you cared for deeply to those wretched perceptions, and to that enslavement. Can you now go on? We haven’t much time, and if you wish to stay out of what’s left to be done-”
He was cut off by a pair of sounds: a clap of thunder from the sky above, then the ringing of the telephone beyond the kitchen. I couldn’t and can’t say exactly why, but for some reason the pairing of those noises reminded me that El Niño was still out and at work, and that I still hadn’t heard anything from him. With that realization I stopped crying for the moment, and struggled to get to my feet.
“I’d better answer that,” I said, starting back toward the kitchen. “It might be El Niño-I left him to watch over the Dusters’ place.”
“Stevie.” I stopped and turned to see the Doctor still studying me, sympathetically, but with real purpose. “If you cannot go on, no one will blame you. But if you choose to go on, then remember what our work is.”
I just nodded, then headed into and past the kitchen, picking up the receiver of the phone and pulling the mouthpiece down. “Yeah?” I said.
“Señorito Stevie.” It was El Niño, all right, his voice still very businesslike and determined. “Do you have news of your friend?”
I sighed once, trying to hold back more tears. “The woman got to her,” I said. “She’s dead. Mr. Picton, too.”
El Niño muttered something softly in a language what I couldn’t place: neither English nor Spanish, I figured it for the native tongue of his people. “So,” he went on, after a moment’s pause. “The need for justice has grown. I am sorry for that, Señorito Stevie.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the stables across from the house of the woman. She has returned there with baby Ana. I paid the man here for to use his telephone.”
“And the Dusters?”
“They are everywhere on the street.”
“Don’t make any play, then,” I told him. “If you can see some of them, that means there’s even more what you can’t see. Stay out of sight.”
“Yes. But if the chance comes-she dies, yes?”
Looking back into the kitchen, I saw that the Doctor and Miss Howard had come into it. They were watching me as I talked, probably knowing full well who was on the other end of the line.