What should she do? What could she do?
She fumbled for her phone. Call Weezy. No, call Jack. He’ll know what to do.
4
Hank stood at the window of his second-floor bedroom and thought about birds. A big, double-hung window. The room sported two of them. Thick, old-fashioned glass with faint ripples through it. But one large bird or a bunch of smaller, determined birds might break through it.
He had birds on the brain because he’d had that dream again and it was worse than ever.
He’d expected to dream about Szeto and his Eurotrash enforcers with bullets through their heads. Those three dead bodies tangled on the floor, all staring eyes and punctured foreheads and blood, so much blood… he couldn’t get the image out of his head.
The death and blood didn’t bother him in the least-really, who gave a shit about Szeto and company? What did bother him was knowing that the guy he’d been looking for all these months had done it. Killed all three-single-handed. Hank was glad now that he’d never found him. Still couldn’t figure out how he’d got free. But the guy was back on the streets now, and he knew Hank had gone out to find some tools to mess him up, so it was a good chance he’d be coming for Hank.
Bad enough, but then the new Kicker Man dream. Not completely new-it started like the others with the K-Man being attacked in the dark by birds or something like birds, unable to fight them off, and finally knocked down and repeatedly buzzed. But it hadn’t stopped there. The birds had left the Kicker Man laid out on the ground. As soon as they flew off, worms slid out of the ground and crawled all over the K-Man… eating him. They didn’t quit till they’d devoured his diamond-shaped head, leaving behind a decapitated stick figure.
Hank didn’t need any gypsy to interpret that dream. The K-Man was Kickerdom, and Hank was its head. Someone wanted Hank’s head. And that someone could only be the guy known as Jack.
Well, Hank Thompson’s head was staying right where it was, and the rest of Hank Thompson was staying right here. Neither that Jack guy nor anyone else was going to scare him off.
Hank was going to take steps.
5
Jack helped the Lady step over the three-foot-high wall of rectangular slabs-they still reminded Jack of headstones-ringing the pyramid. The three of them stopped and stared at the structure.
Odd glyphs had been carved in the outer surface of each megalith, and remained faintly visible. He could make out three from this angle:
Eddie had also called it a giant stone teepee, and that wasn’t too far off. But it looked ancient, felt ancient… and alien.
Everything was exactly as he remembered it. No sign of vandalism or evidence that anyone else had discovered it. The absence of litter confirmed that.
Weezy must have been thinking along the same lines. “Nice to know that some secrets remain secret,” she said.
The Lady approached the pyramid. She stopped at the opening between a pair of the megaliths and stuck her head through.
“I believe Srem was right,” she said as Jack and Weezy came up behind her. “This does have a power of occultation.”
“Great,” Jack said. “Then we won’t have to worry about anyone sneaking up on you.”
She pulled her head back and turned to face them.
“It might have had the power to hide me completely when it was whole.” She pointed to the broken megalith. “But it is not.”
Weezy frowned. “But then-?”
“It will, however, reduce awareness of me, and diffuse what seeps through. If you have a sensitivity to me, you will know that I exist, but you will not be able to pinpoint my location.”
Jack grinned. “Perfect.”
The Lady thrust her arm through the slit. “Let us waste no time then.”
She turned sideways and squeezed through the opening, easing herself down to the sunken sandy floor within. She strode to the stone column, maybe a foot in diameter and four feet high, that stood in the exact center of the space, then turned to face them.
“I will stay here.”
Jack didn’t know what to say. He glanced at Weezy, close beside him, and she seemed at a loss for words too.
“Go,” the Lady said, making a shooing motion. “You both have more important things to do than stand here and stare at me.”
“Just… leave?” Weezy said.
“Yes. Go.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“Perfectly fine.”
“Won’t you be lonely?”
“How can I be lonely when I have all of you-when I am all of you?”
Good point.
“Do you need-?”
“I need you to go about your business.”
Jack took Weezy’s arm and gently pulled her away.
“You heard her, Weez.”
“Yeah, but…” She came with him, but kept looking back over her shoulder. “Walking away and just leaving her there-with a storm coming, no less-seems so… wrong.”
Jack looked back and saw the old woman standing alone in the cold within the confines of the megaliths. He knew how Weezy felt.
“Yeah, it does, because we keep thinking of her as an old woman. But that’s simply the avatar she’s stuck with. She’s not an old woman. And she doesn’t feel cold or hot, rain and snow don’t bother her, she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep, and she doesn’t feel lonely. Ever.”
They made their way back to the Jeep and headed back to Johnson, driving in silence until they reached Old Town.
“Do we have time to swing by our old places?”
Jack nodded. “Tons of time.”
Back over the bridge and then onto North Franklin up to Adams Street where Weezy used to live. He slowed as they passed and let her stare at her place.
“Want me to stop?”
She shook her head. “No. Seen enough.” She leaned back. “I don’t know why people have such nostalgia for their childhoods.”
“Was yours so bad?”
“I remember the grammar school years as being pretty good-at least I don’t remember anything bad. But high school…” She shook her head again. “As soon as I stopped being the Stepford child and started thinking for myself, it all went to hell.”
“You went goth.”
“I didn’t go anything.”
He smiled. “Oh, right. Black shirts, black jeans, lots of eyeliner, Bauhaus, Siouxie… you were a disco queen.”
“Okay, okay, I fit a type. But I didn’t go around thinking, ‘Look at me, I’m a goth.’ It was what I liked. And what my folks hated, unfortunately.”
“Yeah, your dad…”
“I still remember that disapproving look on his face every time he’d see me. Every time. I was on an emotional seesaw as it was, with my moods all over the place, and he made it ten times worse.”
Jack remembered her ups and downs, wild swings sometimes.
She sighed. “Even after the doctors came up with a drug cocktail to even me out-well, I never evened out, but the amplitude of the swings lessened. Even so, high school was hell.”
Not for Jack. He remembered having a pretty good time. But he wasn’t about to say that.
She reached over and rubbed his shoulder. “Except for you, Jack. You were my rock. You never rejected me, even at my nuttiest.”
Jack was wondering what he could say that wouldn’t sound lame. The ringing of his cell phone saved him.
“I’m calling from the Easy Peasy,” said a male voice. “You left a message about a charter?”
“Yeah. Thanks for calling back. First thing: you have a depth finder?”
A snort. “Course I do.”
“Can you take me out to the Hudson Canyon where it’s a mile deep?”
“Yeah.” He stretched the word. “We are talking fishing here, right?”
“No. Scientific experiment.”
Weezy gave him a look and he shrugged. Couldn’t very well tell the guy he was dumping a sword overboard.
“How many people?”
“Two. Just me and my assistant.”
Another Weezy look.
He pressed the mute button. “Eddie?”
She nodded.