“Caroline?” he called.
There was no reply for a moment, then, softly, “Yes.”
“You okay, honey?”
“I think so.”
“Open up.”
His eyes searched the shadows. He thought that he could sm R a he couldell a strange perfume on the air. It was sharp and metallic. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the smell of the dead man’s blood. He looked down and saw that it was on his shoes.
She opened the door. He stepped inside. When he tried to reach for her, she moved away.
“I saw them,” she said. “I saw them coming for me.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw them too.”
“The one who got hit…”
“He’s dead.”
She shook her head.
“No.”
“I’m telling you, he’s dead. His skull was crushed.”
She was leaning against the wall now. He gripped her shoulders.
“Look at me,” he said. She did as he asked, and he saw hidden knowledge in her eyes.
“He’s dead,” he said, for the third time.
She let out a deep breath. Her eyes flicked toward the window.
“Okay,” she said, and he knew that she did not believe him, although he could not understand why. “What about the woman?”
“Gone.”
“She’ll come back.”
“We’ll move you.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“This place was supposed to be safe.”
“I was wrong.”
“You didn’t believe me.”
He nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t. I do now. I don’t know how they found you, but I was wrong. Look, did you make any calls? Did you tell anyone-a friend, a relative-where you were?”
Her eyes turned back to him. She looked tired. Not frightened or angry, just weary.
“Who would I call?” she asked. “I have no one. There’s only you.”
And with nowhere else to turn, Will called Jimmy Gallagher, so that while the cops gathered statements, Jimmy was moving Caroline to a motel in Queens, but not before driving around for hours, trying to shake off anyone who might be following them. When he had her safely checked in, he stayed with her in her room until, at last, she fell asleep, then he watched TV until morning came.
While he did so, Will was lying to the cops on the scene. He told the officers that he’d be R ae’den uptown visiting a friend, and had seen a man crossing the street with a gun in his hand. He had challenged him, and the man had been turning in response, his gun raised, when the truck hit him. None of the other witnesses seemed to recall the woman who had been with him; in fact, the other witnesses couldn’t even remember seeing the man cross the street. It was as though, for them, he had materialized in that spot. Even the driver of the truck said that one second the street in front of him was empty, and the next there was a man being pulled under the wheels of his vehicle. The driver was in shock, although there was no question of any blame accruing to him; the lights had been in his favor, and he had been well within the speed limit.
Once he had made his statement, Will waited for a time in a coffee shop, watching the front of the now-empty apartment house and the bustle at the spot of the man’s death, hoping to see again the woman with the washed-out face and the dark eyes, but she did not come. If she was mourning the loss of her partner, she was doing so elsewhere. Finally, he gave up and joined Jimmy and Caroline at the motel, and while Caroline slept, he told Jimmy everything.
“He told me about the pregnancy, the woman, the dead man,” said Jimmy. “He kept returning to the way the guy had looked, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so…wrong.”
“And what did he decide?” I asked.
“Another man’s clothes,” said Jimmy.
“What does that mean?”
“You ever see somebody wearing a suit that isn’t his, or trying to fit his feet into borrowed shoes, ones that are maybe a size too small or too large? Well, that was what was wrong with the dead man, according to your father. It was like he’d borrowed another man’s body, but it didn’t fit the way that it should. Your old man worried at it like a dog at a bone, and that was the best that he could come up with, weeks later: it was almost as if he felt there was something living inside that guy’s body, but it wasn’t him. Whatever he had once been, or whoever he had once been, was long gone. This thing had chewed it away.”
He watched me then, waiting for a response. When none came, he said:
“I’m tempted to ask if you think that sounds crazy, but I know too much about you to believe you if you said yes.”
“You ever get a name on him?” I asked, ignoring what he had just said.
“There wasn’t much of the guy left to identify. A sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness, though, based on your father’s description, and we circulated it. Bingo! A woman comes forward, says it looks like her husband, name of Peter Ackerman. He’d run off on her five years before. Met some girl in a bar, and that was it. Thing about it was, the wife said it was completely out of character for her husband. He was an accountant, a by-the-numbers guy. Loved her, loved his kids. He had his routines, and he stuck to them.”
I shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first man to disappoint his wife in that way.”
“No, I guess not. But we haven’t even gotten to the strange stuff. Ackerman had served in Korea, so his prints eventually checked out. The wife gave a R awife gavedetailed description of his appearance though, since his face was gone: he had a Marine tat on his left arm, an appendectomy scar on his abdomen, and a chunk missing from his right calf where a bullet had caught him at the Chosin Reservoir. The body taken from under the truck had all of those markings, and one more. It seemed like he’d picked up another tattoo since he’d deserted his wife and family. Well, not so much a tattoo. More of a brand.”
“A brand?”
“It was burned into his right arm. Hard to describe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but your old man followed it up. He found out what it was.”
“And?”
“It was the symbol of an angel. A fallen angel. ‘An-’ something was the name. Animal. No, that’s not it. Hell, it’ll come to me.”
I was treading carefully now. I didn’t know how much Jimmy knew of some of the men and women I had encountered in the past, and of how some of them shared strange beliefs, convinced that they were fallen beings, wandering spirits.
Demons.
“This man was marked with an occult symbol?”
“That’s right.”
“A fork?” That was a mark I had seen before. The ones who bore it had called themselves “Believers.”
“What?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then his expression changed and I understood that he knew more about me than I might have wished, and I wondered how. “No, not a fork. It was different. It didn’t seem like anything that had meaning, but everything does, if you look hard enough at it.”