What had it been like to be eleven years old? Twelve? If she couldn’t sleep, her father would pile together a nest of old blankets in the middle of the sound pit. She’d curl into the nest, and he’d extinguish the lights. In that soundless, lightless place he could delete the whole world. Then slowly he’d construct a new world around her. Seated at the mixing console he’d create the sound of wind. He’d add the crackle of logs in a fireplace. The sonorous tick-tock of an antique clock. The rattle of a loose pane in a leaded-glass window. Her father would build a castle around her and place her in the highest tower. Doing all of this with only sound, he’d place her in a canopy bed hung with embroidered velvet, and she’d fall asleep. That was her memory of being twelve.
Foster jerked awake. A dog’s bark, or something like a dog’s bark, had broken his sleep. Slumped in the driver’s seat of a car, he found himself parked at the edge of a grassy yard. A rotund man tossed a baseball to a cap-headed little boy who tossed it back. Not a dog barking, the noise had been the slap of the leather catcher’s mitt the kid wore.
His car was nosed into the curb. He’d parked at an angle to the lawn of an apartment complex, in one of a long row of diagonal parking spaces. The spaces on either side of his were empty.
Slouched as he was, Foster could see the man and the boy, but it was unlikely they could see him. The car he’d bought off Craigslist. Fifteen hundred dollars for a beater Dodge Dart with duct tape patching the seats, and a couple hundred thou on the odometer. An AM radio. The oil pan leaked. A fry cook in a fast-food uniform had signed over the title. They’d done the deal in the parking lot during the cook’s lunch break. The tags were good for another ten months. Big bench seats meant he could sleep if he didn’t get caught for vagrancy.
The fry cook said he trusted Foster to transfer the title. Fat chance of that.
Whoever had tinted the car’s windows had done a lousy job. The blue film had bubbled and rippled until it felt as if he were underwater. Still, it was good enough to keep out unwanted attention.
According to the Internet Movie Database, the film dubbed with Lucinda’s scream was called Babysitter Bloodbath. To his surprise the actress was a bit of a legend. Blush Gentry, she’d played the pretty sidekick in a generation of horror films. Always the funny blonde sexpot, she’d cracked the jokes and denied there was a serial killer until she became his victim. In most of her roles she died with blood bubbling from her lovely mouth.
Most of Ms. Gentry’s work had fallen from public awareness, but this one film still drew an audience.
Seventeen years ago, when she’d made the movie, she’d been twenty-four. That put her age at forty-one. A few years Foster’s junior, but not many.
These days Blush Gentry paid her bills on the convention circuit. At Comic Cons and Wizard Worlds and Dragon Cons she charged for autographs and for posing with fans for pictures. She maintained a sizable following on social media.
The old man and the kid continued to toss the horsehide between them.
Intuition prompted Foster to activate his phone. He knew not to keep it on for long, not when any ping off a cell tower could bring a SWAT team down on him. He shuffled through his database of photos just to be certain.
It was the old man. Without question. The man playing catch was Otto Von Geisler, the notorious Belgian child pimp. Foster’s proof was a low-resolution Interpol photograph of the monster’s ear.
Foster weighed the risk as he unbuckled his seat belt. He slipped the gun from his shoulder holster. Big redbrick apartment houses and small lawns stretched in every direction.
His plan: Grab the kid. Save the kid and pistol-whip the predator.
A horn honked. A crackle of radio static and the hushed roll of tires brought another car into the space on the passenger side of his. A police cruiser, it nosed into the curb.
From where Foster slouched he could see only the rack of lights on the roof, but he heard the driver’s-side door. Staying low, watching across the length of the front seat, he saw a uniformed patrolman step out and walk toward the game of catch.
A voice called out, “Hello, officer.” The man, not the boy. Von Geisler’s voice.
As Foster watched, the patrolman offered a phone to Von Geisler and said, “Sorry to bother you nice folks.” He nodded to draw their gaze to the phone. “But have you seen the man in this picture?”
Von Geisler took the phone and studied it. The boy closed the gap between them and craned his neck to look. The monster elbowed the boy and said, “Looks like a mean hombre, don’t he?” To the officer he said, “What’s he wanted for?”
The officer said, “Assault with a deadly weapon.” After a quick cautious glance at the boy, he added, “And knowingly receiving online images of an illegal nature.”
Whoever had gotten into his office computer had known how to search better than Foster knew how to scrub.
The doctor said, “Congratulations.” He was peering down into his stainless-steel sink. Studying a new mess of ashes scattered across the bottom.
The specter of pregnancy jolted Mitzi. Otherwise she felt like a normal person. Her hangover had passed, and she hoped that was the cause for congratulations.
It wasn’t a child Mitzi wanted to avoid so much as the day she’d eventually have to tell the child the true nature of the family business.
At school, Mitzi, little Mitzi, insecure only-child Mitzi with no mother at home and only her father, she’d been a broken record. My daddy makes movies. My daddy did the voice in that cartoon, in the part where the mermaid trades her tail
