“Ready?” she asked.
He nodded from the adjacent loveseat. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out the harmonica, turning it over in his hands for a moment. Then he tossed it to her.
Cameo caught it deftly and studied it herself. She put it to her lips and blew a tentative note that came out like a blaaaattt! from a whoopie cushion. She paused, then ran a simple scale, smiled, and a song came spilling out of it that Nighthawk hadn’t heard in a long time. It was Robert Johnson’s “Drunken-Hearted Man,” and before it ended Nighthawk was laughing and crying and clapping his hands in time all at once. He recognized the style in which it was played, and there was no doubt at all in his mind that it was Lightning Robert Nash blowing like he did back in ‘46 when they were both dying together in that charity hospital.
Cameo took the harmonica from her lips and smiled. “You looking good for such an old fart, Nighthawk. Too damn good.”
Choked up with emotion, Nighthawk couldn’t answer for a moment. “I… I got a disease that day. You remember.”
“Hard to forget the day I died, old boy.”
Nighthawk nodded. “I’ve never forgotten, either. This disease went way deep into me, deeper than my flesh, deeper than my bone. It changed me. It gave me powers, Lightning. I can take other peoples’ essence. I can take it from them and use it myself.”
Lightning Robert whistled through Cameo’s lips. “That sounds mighty powerful, John.”
Nighthawk nodded solemnly. “It is. I’ve tried to use it righteously over the years... but that first day... when it first came over me... I didn’t know how to control it.” He looked down, unable to look his old friend in Cameo’s eyes. “I took too much from you, Lightning. And I killed you. I’ve been living all these years afraid that I stole your soul—or part of it—to keep me alive. You, and others, that day.”
Lightning looked at him. “You may have took something from me, John, but it wasn’t my soul.” He laughed. “I seem to still have that. I sure do.”
“I’m glad of that, Lightning.”
“Maybe you killed me.” Cameo’s head shook. “I don’t know. I do know I was old and dying, anyway. The cancer was eating me alive. I hurt. Man, how I hurt. If you were able to take the pain away and by the way send me home, well, John, we was friends. I wouldn’t begrudge you that.”
“Thank you, Lightning.”
“My pleasure, John.” He looked around. “Where am I, anyway?”
“You’re in the body of a young lady named Cameo. She was able to call you back by holding your harmonica.”
Lightning looked down at it, held in her small white hands. “You live in a strange world, John Nighthawk.”
Nighthawk laughed. “You don’t know the half of it, Lightning. I’m a hundred and fifty years old now. In my time men have walked on the moon and visited the planets of another star. Men can fly. They can read your mind. They can turn invisible and disappear. They can do most anything except bring peace to the world.”
Lightning shook his head. “Then I’m glad I’m where I am and you’re here. You was always one for stirring things up, John. I was the quiet one.”
They sat in silence for a moment like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades enjoying an unexpected meeting.
Then Nighthawk asked, “What’s it like, Lightning, where you’re at now?”
Lightning looked at him and smiled. “I can’t rightly say, John. It’s like I don’t know anything past the time my heart stopped beating, but there’s dreams, like, I can almost remember. Dreams of a place that feels like home.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“That’s all I can say.”
Nighthawk nodded. It was enough. He knew now that he hadn’t destroyed his friend’s soul all those years ago. If he had, Cameo would never have been able to call it back from wherever it was now.
“You got to get back right away?” Nighthawk asked.
Lightning Robert Nash considered. “I can sit awhile. Play some tunes.”
“That’d be nice,” Nighthawk said.
“You know this one,” Lightning said, and put the mouth organ to his lips and started to blow “Sweet Home Chicago.”
John Nighthawk clapped his hands and sung in a sweet baritone that age had not dulled.
Those who heard them faintly through the walls of Nighthawk’s small house were mesmerized by the music. It sounded like nothing they’d ever heard before, as if it were being played by spirits, or perhaps angels.
Las Vegas
Ray spent the afternoon with a special flying SWAT squad investigating Butcher Dagon’s progress through Las Vegas, which was marked by a tidal wave of unsubstantiated rumor and a smaller trail of very substantiated bodies spread across the city in no discernible pattern.
The SWAT team guys were all right, but Ray would have felt better if they’d had at least some other wild carders in the field who had some useful powers. It turned out, however, that the Las Vegas PD was not exactly on the cutting edge when it came to hiring non-nats. Not that the telepaths pulled off casino patrol by Captain Martinez didn’t have their uses.
The command center that Martinez set up to deal with the Dagon situation got over five hundred tips in the first four hours, thanks mainly to Ray’s suggestion to publicize the killer ace’s escape as widely as possible. It was hard to separate the few clearly authentic sightings from cases of mistaken identity from the ravings of the lunatic fringe, but the telepaths helped. They were able to immediately discredit the obvious loonies and attention-seekers, but plenty of dead ends were left that had to be investigated.
The widespread publicity also led to a series of unfortunate gaffes. Six portly tourists were mistaken for Dagon and arrested before they could be vetted and cleared by the telepaths. Two other innocents were assaulted by irate vigilante bands, one in a cheap dive off the strip, the other in a gay bar that was having teddy bear day. Fortunately neither were seriously injured.
Ray and the SWAT guys, backed up by experienced homicide detectives, investigated four bodies that were found with Dagon’s M.O.—excessively brutal violence—literally stamped all over them, but by the time the bodies had been discovered the crime scenes were cold. There were no witnesses, no clues as to Dagon’s current whereabouts.
Around sunset a fifth body was found behind an abandoned 7-11 in a poorer section of the city. It had been stuffed between the back seat and the floor of a vehicle that had been left in the alley behind the deserted building, the keys still in the ignition.
“What’s bothering me,” Ray said to the SWAT team commander,
“is, what is Dagon thinking? There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to his activities. Yeah, he’s out of jail, he’s on the run, but what’s he trying to accomplish here? What’s his ultimate goal in all this wandering around?”
“Maybe he’s changing his hiding spots,” the SWAT guy said. “But he can’t stay hidden forever, especially if he keeps littering the city with bodies. He must have some kind of goal in mind—maybe he’s trying to reach a safe house. Maybe someplace where he can connect with his gang again.”
Ray nodded. He looked thoughtfully at the back of the 7-11. It was boarded up and graffiti-ed to Hell and back. “You may be right,” he said, strolling toward the structure.
He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He looked at the SWAT lieutenant, who stared back, and then silently waved his arms to his men to gain their attention. Ray opened the door slowly, and from inside the structure came the sound of some animal howling a long, drawn-out, lingering greeting. It sounded almost human.
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said. He threw open the door, and looked inside the abandoned store.