“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Gabe wanted to talk to him.” And then something suddenly occurred to her, something she had nearly forgotten. She slumped back in her chair, and felt all the energy drain out of her as if it were one final breath before dying. “Oh, my God.”
“What? What is it?”
“I just remembered. That thing Childs mentioned, that Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome. Gabe’s aging process—it’s speeding up.”
[72]
For a time after that, nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. The implication was like a dark secret suddenly exposed to the light of day. Out in the open, it was perhaps more manageable, but that didn’t make it any less monumental. Time had become of the essence now.
A sense of despondence quietly settled over Teri like a dark thunder cloud, and she nearly let herself sink back into the abyss of the last couple of days. That would have been easy for her. So easy. All she would have had to do was close her eyes, and let the sleep come. But instead she got up and stood at the living room window. She gazed out over the city lights, watching the traffic patterns glow, and thinking how huge the town had grown the past fifteen years.
Gabe was out there somewhere.
And he needed her.
When she came back to the table, Walt took out his pencil and they made a list of things they needed to get done, people they needed to talk to. The list went on for nearly three pages, one item, one line. And they agreed to get started on it the next morning.
It was a little after midnight when Teri finally went off to bed.
Tomorrow was going to be the day she started looking.
And she was going to keep looking until Gabe came home again.
[73]
Mitch watched the lights go off in the upstairs apartment. He opened his notebook, checked his watch, and made this entry: 12:27 A.M. TRAVIS APARTMENT. LIGHTS OFF.
It was getting cold out. The sky was clear and according to the weatherman the temperature was supposed to slip below forty tonight. He closed his notebook, stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat, and leaned against the corner of the building, deciding to wait awhile longer. A couple more minutes of enduring the cold and he could assure himself they had truly retired for the night. Always better to be on the safe side.
Mitch blew some heat into his cupped hands, then folded his arms across his chest, and watched a brown tabby emerge from the row of shrubs across the walkway. The cat let out a hungry meow and weaved back and forth between Mitch’s legs before he picked her up.
“What are you doing out in the cold, huh? Somebody lock you out?” He scratched behind her ear, absently enjoying the deep resonance of her purr, while he watched the apartment.
Two of a kind, we are, huh? Out late like this.
Except cats were known for their independence and now that Mitch thought about it, however briefly, he realized he had never been what you might call independent. Divorced. No children. Nothing had worked in his life until he had enlisted in the military in his early twenties. From that day until this, he had thrived on being told what to do next. As long as there was someone willing to hand down the orders, Mitch had his place in the world.
Maybe they weren’t two of a kind after all.
“Still, it’s too cold for man or beast,” he said, absently.
He went to return the cat to the ground and the sudden movement sent the tabby into a surprising frenzy. She let out a wail, scratched him across the back of the hand, and struggled to free herself from his grasp. Mitch let out a wail of his own, and wrapped his hand around the cat’s neck.
“Jesus, you little bastard! Jesus Christ Almighty! Why’d you go and do that!”
In one swift motion, he flung her across the walkway. She struck a six-by-six support beam, let out another screech, and fell to the ground, dazed. Mitch checked his hand. The scratch had drawn blood.
“Jesus.”
The tabby climbed drunkenly to her feet, shook her head, then wandered back into the maze of shrubbery.
“Jesus Christ, you little bastard!”
He sucked blood from the wound and spit it out, hating the coppery taste it left in his mouth. Enough. That was enough for one night. He took another drink of blood, spit it out, and started around the corner on slightly shaky legs.
The car was parked on the other side of the street, half a block down. As Mitch made his way along the sidewalk, images from the accident the other day floated back to him like lost, soulless ghosts. Though he had lost one of his men (something he had experienced only twice before, both occasions under hostile circumstances), it wasn’t the accident that had troubled him. It was knowing that it could have been prevented if he had done his job right in the first place. The first night – the night he had gone to the Knight house after the boy – that should have been the end of it. Right there, right then. There never should have been an accident. There never should have been a death.
He arrived at the car, climbed in, and sat there a moment.
The street was deserted. There had been a brief shower earlier in the day, and the sheen of standing water was a mirror to the street lights all the way down the block. A Mercedes passed by, its tires wading noisily through the puddles.
Night… the time of dark secrets and faceless people, Mitch thought remotely.
They had come upon Walter Travis as much by accident as anything, which—if a man were to be honest with himself—was the way most things happened in life. The world was not nearly as organized or purposeful as we liked to fool ourselves into believing. Chance, Mitch had long ago come to realize, played a bigger role than any of us cared to admit.
In this instance, someone apparently knew someone, who knew someone else, who knew someone in the local police department. And that someone was familiar with the Knight woman and her background. He was also apparently familiar with Walter Travis, an ex-cop. Mitch didn’t have the full story—as usual, the less he knew the better off he was—but apparently there had been some sort of past relationship between the two of them.
So someone had gambled on a tap, and the tap had paid off.
It had been as simple as that.
Mitch started up the car, looked over his shoulder, saw there was no traffic, and pulled out into the lane. It was nearly one in the morning now. He’d have to be back here again around seven or so, in case one of them happened to be an early riser. How long this was going to go on, he didn’t know, but he hoped it wouldn’t be much longer. This was not the kind of assignment that made him eager to get up in the morning.
He passed a thin man in his late fifties, uneven beard stubble, gray hair, ragged clothes that were a couple of sizes too large. The man walked as if he had no bones. His arms dangled lazily, his knees seemed to buckle with each and every step. Without looking up, he raised his right arm into the air and flipped Mitch the finger.
Night… the time of dark secrets and faceless people.
[74]
In what he thought was mid-morning—there was no clock in the room—Gabe busied himself with a hand-held video game. It was a poker game and it was one of a dozen or so games that had been brought in the day before. They had also brought in a color television set. It was somehow rigged to the Cartoon Network. There were only so many hours of cartoons a kid could watch.
The poker game beeped and a new hand was dealt: two fives, a king, a queen, and a seven. No chance for a flush or a straight. Gabe balanced the game on one leg while he pressed the necessary buttons to keep the two fives.