“I don’t see why not,” Valentine said.
“Will you be home soon?”
“Another hour or two.”
“I’ll stay up. Thank you for keeping your promise to me. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Valentine said goodbye and hung up. He heard someone coming up from the basement. Banko appeared at the top of the steps looking shaken. His superior went to the sink and let cold water run, then splashed it repeatedly in his face.
“Something wrong?” Valentine asked.
Banko indicated the basement stairs. “Down there. He wasn’t just into women.”
The basement stairs were old and creaky, and Valentine descended while clutching the wood railing. At the bottom, he found himself in a large, finished room used to house Hollis’s vast collection of magic equipment. There was more stuff than Uncle Al’s store, and he saw several rows of folding chairs facing a makeshift plywood stage on the other side of the room, and guessed that Hollis had put on shows for the neighborhood kids.
A uniformed cop stood on the stage next to a large trunk. The trunk was covered with stickers from faraway places like Singapore and China. It looked like a prop, only the uniform’s ashen face said otherwise. Valentine climbed onto the stage.
“This is sick,” the uniform said.
“What’s sick?” Valentine asked.
“See for yourself.”
The uniform flipped back the trunk’s lid, and Valentine stared inside. His heart skipped a beat. A little boy lay face-down in the bottom of the trunk. The child was small, with bushy brown hair the texture of cotton candy, and wore a small tuxedo.
“God damn monster,” the uniform said.
Valentine looked at the empty chairs facing the stage. Had Hollis snatched a kid from the audience of one of his shows, and later killed him? It seemed the likely answer, only he couldn’t remember a young child having gone missing in a long time. As the uniform closed the trunk, Valentine noticed a name stenciled on the trunk’s lid. Woody.
“We need to let the medics handle this,” the uniform said.
Valentine flipped the trunk open, and touched the back of the boy’s head. The hair was fake. He grabbed the boy by the collar, and lifted him clean into the air.
Woody was a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Valentine raced up the creaky stairs holding Woody in his arms. The kitchen was empty, and he ran out the front door. The cruiser with Hollis had left. He found Banko standing in the driveway, and shoved Woody into his arms.
“It’s a dummy,” Valentine said.
The horror ebbed from Banko’s face. “Is this what I saw in the basement?”
“Yes. Hollis is a ventriloquist. That’s how I got tricked the other day at the Bijou, when the piano nearly fell on me. You need to alert whoever’s driving that cruiser that Hollis can throw his voice. Otherwise he’ll trick him, just like he tricked me.”
Banko climbed into the cruiser. Getting on the radio, he called Marlene, and told her to contact the cruiser, then call him back. Hanging up, he said, “I got fooled by a dummy. God, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
The dispatcher called back a few moments later.
“He’s not picking up,” Marlene said.
“Try him again,” Banko said.
“I tried several times. He’s not answering.”
“Has the cruiser come in?”
“No, sir. There’s no sign of him.”
“Keep trying.”
“Yes, sir.”
Banko signed off. He turned to speak to Valentine, and saw that he was gone.
Lois sat at the dining room table grading a stack of history tests when she heard the rock come through the glass in the back door. The detectives assigned to guard her had gone home, and she froze in her chair. The nightmare was over. Tony had said as much. It’s over, she told herself.
Staring through the open doorway to the kitchen, she saw a man’s hand come through the broken pane of glass, and fumble as it tried to unlock the back door. She’d learned a lot of practical things from Tony over the years. The first, and most important, was never to panic. Rising, she went to the head of the stairs, and called to her son. “Gerry, I want you to go to your room, and lock the door. You hear me?”
Her son appeared at the head of the stairs. “What was that noise? What’s going on?”
“Go to your room.”
“But—”
“Now!”
She heard Gerry’s door slam. Then the back door banged open. She calmly crossed the room, and removed the Smith & Wesson Model 65 revolver from a shelf in the china cabinet. Tony had given the gun to her one Christmas, and taken her to a firing range and taught her how to shoot. It was a hefty, solid piece of steel. Equipped with a speed-loader, it was capable of popping all six rounds at once.
Two men entered the kitchen, and staggered towards her. The first was a baby-faced cop, the second a smaller man with a bloody face, who pressed a handgun to the cop’s side. Holding the Model 65 with both hands, Lois aimed at them.
“Stop,” she declared.
“Hello, Lois,” the man with the bloody face said.
“I said stop!”
The two men were inside the living room, and halted.
“Do you remember me?” the bloodied man asked. “My name’s Martin Hollis. Everyone calls me Farky. We met on the Boardwalk many years ago. I was in the Summer of Love show with you.”
Hollis wrapped his free arm around the cop’s neck, and pressed the handgun to his temple. “Put your gun down, or I’ll splatter his brains against your lovely dining room walls.”
“No,” Lois said.
“Do you want me to kill him?”
“He’s a cop. He knows the risks.”
The cop’s eyes went wide.
“I’m sorry,” Lois told him.
“God damn you, I said drop it,” Hollis screamed at her.
“No!”
“Very well.”
Raising his gun, Hollis pointed it at the ceiling, and let off a round.
Lois heard a loud thump on the second floor. She envisioned Gerry taking the bullet and nearly fainted. Hollis pressed the gun’s smoking barrel against the cop’s chin.
“Now, drop your gun,” Hollis said.
“Gerry,” she yelled upstairs, “are you all right?”
“What’s going on,” her son yelled back fearfully.
“What was that sound?”
“I heard a gunshot and dropped my guitar on the floor.”
“Stay in your room. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, mom.”
Hollis nodded at the ceiling. “He’s right above me. I can hear the pitter-patter of his little feet. I’ll shoot him through the floor. Do you want that?”
“No!” Lois exclaimed.
“Then do as I say, and put your gun away.”
Lois started to cry. Tony had told her to never put the gun down when faced with certain danger. But what choice did she have? She slipped the Model 65 back into the china cabinet. As she moved away from the weapon, her husband entered through the back door, gasping for breath. In his hand was his beloved snub-nosed .38.
“Drop the gun, and put your hands in the air,” Tony said.
Hollis glanced over his shoulder, then turned to look at her. “I love you. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Lois said quietly.
Hollis shoved the young cop into the dining room, then spun around like a gunslinger. Her husband emptied the .38 into him, the bullets tearing through his sweatshirt. Hollis staggered back and stopped a few feet from where Lois stood. He made a face like he was dying. Then, he burst out laughing.
“Fooled you!” Hollis shouted.
He lifted his sweatshirt, and showed Lois the bulletproof vest he’d stolen from the police cruiser. He was a magician, and had tricked them.