Jack had to laugh. 'You damn near drowned less than an hour ago!'
'But I didn't. Maybe I wasn't supposed to. Let's face it, if it wanted to kill me, it had its chance Sunday night. It could've smashed my head instead of my bathroom mirror.'
'That's a point,' Jack said. 'But maybe you're not the one it's interested in. And the question remains: Why now? You've been in that house for almost a year, you said. Why should this thing wait for my arrival on Friday night to start manifesting herself?'
'Not just your arrival,' Lyle said. 'Gia's too.'
Jack looked at him. 'You're just not gonna drop that bone, are you?'
Lyle shrugged. 'I can't help it. I still think it's connected to Gia.'
'Can we stop with the 'it' business?' Gia said. ' 'It' is a 'she.' A little girl.'
'But do we know that for sure?' Lyle said. 'Maybe it can take on any form it wants. Maybe it's chosen to look like a little girl because it knows that's what'll get to you.'
Gia blinked. Jack could tell she hadn't considered that possibility. Neither had he. Uneasiness crawled through his gut. Maybe Gia was involved after all.
After a heartbeat's pause, Gia shook her head. 'I don't buy that. I think she's limited in what she can do and she's trying to tell us something.'
'What?'
'That back in 1967 or thereabouts a little girl was murdered in your house and she's buried in the basement.'
Silence at the table, everyone staring at Gia.
She stared back. 'What? Look at what we've got.' She ticked off her points on her fingers. 'A little girl with a hole in her chest, singing a song from 1967, leaving a trail of blood to a basement full of blood, that drains away through a hole in the floor. Open your eyes, guys. It's all right there, staring you in the face.'
Lyle gave a slow nod. He glanced at Charlie. 'I think we need to learn more about our house.'
'How we do that?' Charlie said.
'How about that old Greek who sold us the place? I didn't pay much attention at the time, but didn't he go on about how every time the house has changed hands, he's been involved? What was his name? I remember it was a real mouthful.'
Charlie grinned. 'Konstantin Kristadoulou. Can't forget no mouthful like that.'
'Right! First thing tomorrow I'm going to call Mr. Kristadoulou and set up a meeting. Maybe he can shed some light on our ghost.'
'Include me in that meeting,' Jack told him. 'I've got a stake in this too.'
More than you can imagine.
'Will do,' Lyle said.
Gia leaned forward. 'But what about tonight? Where are you sleeping?'
'In my bed.'
She shook her head. 'Aren't you...?'
'Scared?' He smiled and shrugged. 'A little. But I figure it must be-'
'She.'
'All right, she must be trying to tell us something. Maybe she wants us to do something, then she'll go away. How can I find out what that is if I'm not there?'
Sounded logical enough to Jack, but he thought he spotted something in Lyle's eyes as he spoke. Working on another agenda, perhaps? Jack wondered what it could be.
He'd worry about that later. Right now his first imperative was to escort Gia back to Manhattan and convince her to stay there. Bad enough to feel that the Otherness had painted a bull's-eye on his back; the possibility that Gia might be targeted too dragged a coil of concertina wire through his gut.
First his sister, then Gia and their unborn child... was that the plan? Crush his spirit-destroy everyone he loved or mattered to him-before crushing him?
Listen to me. Sound like a raving paranoiac.
Hey, everybody! I'm so important, there's a cosmic power out to get me and everybody close to me!
But... if he had indeed been drafted into the supposed shadow war, it might be true.
Jack felt the breath leak out of him. He had to find a way to get himself discharged, even if it was dishonorable.
But first-first-first: place Gia out of harm's way.
12
'Like I told you before,' Fred Strauss said, his voice halfway to a whisper. 'He's a ghost, a fucking ghost.'
Eli Bellitto lay in his hospital bed and stared at the flickering polychromatic beacon of the TV screen in his darkened hospital room.
'Who's a ghost?' Adrian said.
Strauss sat at the right foot of the bed, Adrian at the left. The big man had propelled himself into the room in his wheelchair. His left knee was braced and straight out before him. Even in the dim light Eli could see the pair of ugly purple swellings on his bare scalp. His long arms hung at his sides, almost touching the floor.
'The guy who clobbered you and stabbed Eli,' Strauss said, his words clipped with impatience. 'Haven't you been listening?'
Adrian's short-term memory hadn't quite recovered yet and he'd been having difficulty following Strauss's excuses for coming up empty in his search for their attacker. Even Eli found his repeated questions annoying.
Adrian shook his head. 'I have no memory of it. I remember having dinner last night, and after that... it's all a blank. If it weren't for my knee and this pounding headache, I'd think you both were having me on.'
Adrian had regained some of his recent memory-at least now he accepted that this was August instead of July-but he'd made this same statement at least half a dozen times since his arrival. Eli wanted to throw something at him.
I'm the one who's suffered the real damage! he wanted to shout. You just got a knock on the head!
He clenched his teeth as a new gush of magma erupted in his groin. His left hand flailed about, found the PCA button, and pressed it; he prayed he hadn't already used up this hour's morphine allotment.
What a day. An afternoon from hell. A nurse, a three-hundred-pound rhino in white named Horgan had come in and insisted he get up and walk. Eli had refused but the woman would not take no for an answer. She may have been black but she was a Nazi at heart, leading him up and down the hall as he clung to his rolling IV pole, his catheter snaking between his knees, his half-full blood-tinged urine bag dangling from a hook on the pole for all to see. Agony enhanced by humiliation.
And then Dr. Sadiq had visited, telling him that he had to walk more, and how tomorrow they'd be removing his catheter-Eli's buttocks clenched at the thought of Nurse Horgan dragging the tube out of him, and that caused another eruption of pain. Dr. Sadiq said he anticipated discharging Eli tomorrow morning.
Not soon enough as far as Eli was concerned. As long as he could take this PCA unit with him.
'In other words,' Eli said to Strauss as the morphine took effect, 'once we trim away all your excess verbiage, we are left with the simple fact that you've failed us.'
The detective spread his hands. 'Hey, I can only do so much. It's not like you two've given me a whole lot to work with.'
It frightened Eli to know that his attacker was still unidentified.
He knows me, but I don't know him.
He could be in the hospital now, pretending to be visiting someone else, but all the while waiting for Strauss and Adrian to leave so that he can come in and finish the job.
If only they had his name. The Circle could take it from there. With their connections they'd make short work of him.
'Did you bring me his number?' Eli asked Strauss.
'Yeah.' He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket 'Got it here.'
'Dial it for me.'
'You're kidding. It can't be traced and he doesn't-'
'Dial it now!'
Shrugging, Strauss punched the number into the bedside phone and handed Eli the receiver. After four rings,
