“So?”
“So the Center can get access, at least eavesdrop, on all the tapes I can’t reach.” Now he was ready. “I want you to get me the latest on Trench.”
“Harry—”
“Lay any shit on me, Josh, and I’ll kick your balls with one of my dead feet. I want Trench and you want the passenger manifest from Flight 22. Fair trade, I’d say.”
“Leave it alone, Harry.”
“I can’t, Josh, don’t you see that I can’t? I think about the bastard every day when I’ve got to sweat buckets just to make it out of bed. Christ, Josh, you ever try to ease yourself into shitting position without legs? That bastard even took a normal squat away from me.”
Bane was about to argue more until he remembered be was as much to blame for what had happened to the Bat as Trench was.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said softly.
The Bat’s eyes were cold. “Tomorrow morning, Josh. I give you the manifest, you give me the latest on Trench. Deal?”
“Deal,” Bane managed reluctantly.
“So are you gonna tell me what you want the manifest for?” the Bat asked after a pause that seemed longer than it was.
“If something really did happen to that plane, I figure the passengers will be able to tell me what. Whoever’s behind it couldn’t cover up something that includes sixty-seven people.”
“Jake could’ve cracked, Josh. It happens.”
“If he cracked, he’d be home safe now.”
The Bat smiled knowingly. “Well, if this don’t sound like the old days, I don’t know what does.”
Bane looked away, something tugging at him. “I handled it all wrong last night,” he confessed. “I knew Jake was telling the truth but I didn’t cover him, didn’t take the right precautions.”
“You know what they say about hindsight.”
“Doesn’t matter. I don’t plan on making the same mistake twice. You carrying, Harry?”
The Bat winked and tapped a pouch concealed beneath his sweater. Metal clanged lightly against metal. “Never wheel myself an inch without my knives,” he assured him.
“That’s good,” Bane said.
Davey was looking at the fountain fronting the Exxon building when The Vibes struck stronger than ever.
He had walked here directly from a Seventh Avenue clothing store which featured an assortment of leather jackets in the window. Davey chose the one he liked best, a bomber style, used The Chill, and walked out with it hugging his shoulders tight. He loved the smell of the fresh leather and decided to challenge the unusually cold spring by hiking across town. This part of the city was fun, what with all the interesting thoughts he was able to tune in on. Davey wondered how all the problems he glimpsed were going to be worked out. Would the blue-suited executive make the switch to another company? Would the man with the striped tie and sunglasses keep his appointment with a high-class hooker instead of taking his wife to dinner? Would the repair shop have the nervous-looking woman in white’s car back to her today, or would she have to brave another day of public transportation? The questions went on and on. After a while Davey got bored considering them and stopped peeking into people’s heads.
He was staring thoughtlessly at the pool when The Vibes came, driving him off the bench to his feet. He didn’t see anything, not yet, but he knew it was coming. Then something scraped his spine like fingernails down a blackboard and he shuddered, dragging his hands to his ears. His knees started to wobble and after a few seconds his whole body joined in, his eyes bulging at the sight The Vibes showed him.
The pool erupted in a burst of steam, its cement mold cracking, splitting, shattering. He saw people running about screaming and gagging for breath. Their fingers scraped the air, gave up, and then held their bodies as if to hold themselves together, but it was no use, because suddenly their flesh was being peeled back like an orange rind. Davey saw knobby skeletons for just an instant before the bones went up with a quick poof! … and then there was nothing, nothing at all except blackness. Davey wanted to scream but suddenly he was alone, no one to hear him. Everything was gone, over. He tried to catch his breath, but there was no air to draw in.
Then The Vibes faded. The fingernails scraped back up his spine and left him cold. The shuddering ceased but he was frozen, his feet held to the cement by some cosmic glue. He looked at the fountain-pool, through it, glad it was back.
And then not so glad.
Because a man stood on the other side watching him, a big man with thick brown hair just starting to creep back over his scalp. Davey regained his thoughts and the shudders started all over again, for the thoughts were jumbled like broken pieces of china and Davey couldn’t put them together. This was not one of the Men but whatever he was scared Davey just as much. Suddenly the man was moving forward, his pace rising to a trot, and all Davey could do was try to dig his feet out of the cement before the big man reached him.
Bane left I–Com-Tech feeling hungry and realized for the first time he had skipped breakfast. The lunch-hour rush would make most places totally intolerable. People squeezing against each other, shouting orders, and sweating out a frenzied rush back to the office played hell with the defenses. Too easy for someone in the crowd to jam a gun against your ribs, or drive a blade between them.
Bane couldn’t stomach such crowds. That part of the Winter Man had never died. And if he was being followed, a crowded lunch room was hardly the ideal location to spot a tail.
So Bane opted against Lindy’s or a similar establishment in favor of the relative quiet of Charley O’s Irish Pub on West Forty-eighth. He’d lunched there before and the food never failed to satisfy.
The perimeter of the fountain-pool before the Exxon building was crowded now with people brown-bag lunching and drinking soda from cans. Bane cut between them, close to the fountain’s edge, and froze all at once. Standing forty yards before him near the right outer rim of the pool was a boy in a leather jacket and jeans, long shaggy hair covering his forehead.
It can’t be …
Bane took one step forward, then another. The ghost from his past didn’t change form or vanish. His eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, though he wished they had been.
He was staring at an older version of his stepson, a vision of what the boy would have looked like now if he had lived!
Bane’s thoughts scrambled. The past mixed with the present, and he forgot where he was. But the boy was still there, standing motionless in his tracks. Their eyes finally met and Bane felt something reach into his head. A dull throb rose behind his eyes, followed by a brief flash of spectral color. Then Bane found himself in motion, incredibly quick and sure. The boy was moving too now, though, stealing a glance behind him into the crowd and locking immediately on Bane.
Bane skirted close enough to the fountain pool to feel the cold spray lifting off. Nothing else mattered: not his hunger, or the missing jet, or Jake Del Gennio, or the passenger manifest. There was only the boy and he had to catch him, had to know if …
If what?
Bane picked up his pace, pushing by those bodies he couldn’t slither through. He saw the gap closing and that was the final fuel he needed for the burst that would close it altogether.
Davey knew the big man was after him and slowed his pace twice to use The Chill. But the man was too much for it, or maybe he needed total concentration to make it work. Davey felt the thoughts exploding from his pursuer’s head but pushed them aside because they frightened him in a way different from any others he’d tuned in on yet. He tried to read the big man and had read enough to know that he was like no other person in the city, not even close.