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"What's in your pack?"
Jeff felt a pang of doubt.
He looked more carefully at the child, figuring him for around ten years old.
His hair was long, the color of Kansas wheat. The eyes were blue, cold, icy
blue.
There was a short-hafted knife tucked into the Captain Sirocco belt and a
silver whistle on a lanyard around his neck.
"Asked what's in the pack," he repeated.
"There's a bit ax to cut the noses off little boys who ask too many
questions."
"It's food," the boy stated flatly, totally ignoring the clumsy attempt at
humor and threat.
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"You hungry?"
"What sort of a stupid question's that?"
Jeff could feel the short hairs prickling at the base of his neck.
"If you like, I'll give you a packet of mint chocolate."
The boy's eyes looked at him with a strange, unafraid contempt.
"You got a pack just filled with food. How come we haven't seen you before,
mister? You been in the city long?"
"Coupla days."
"That'd be it."
"Want this chocolate?" Now Jeff was beginning to feel the beginnings of anger.
"Or you can just push off, kid."
Before Jeff could move, the boy had taken the whistle and blown a series of
high, piercing blasts on it.
Jeff's broad-bladed knife slithered from its sheath, but the lad was way too
quick.
Darting back a few paces, mocking the man's clumsiness, he blew the whistle in
another echoing triple shrill.
"Why not run, deadhead?" he said, beckoning to Jeff with ragged-nailed
fingers.
In the stillness of the cemetery city, Jeff could hear feet pattering toward
him from all directions all directions except from toward the water.
The backpack making him awkward, Jeff Thomas had run for his life.
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Now, in the upper depths of the Ghirardelli block, he stood up and peeked out
of the window. There was nobody in sight.
Jeff turned, but the corner of the pack snagged on a shard of jagged glass,
snapping it. There was a crash as it spun and landed on the sidewalk, three
floors down.
"He's up there," screeched a triumphant voice. "Let's get him."
He heard them entering the old building, coming after him, and he drew his
knife.
Jeff had seen them as they trailed him. He'd realized that in the forefront of
a raggedy group of ten- and twelve-year-olds were young, rabid-looking males.
In the dusty gloom, he waited.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jim Hilton buried his daughter Andrea, alongside his wife, Lori.
Ramon and Carrie had both offered to help, but he'd refused. "My little girl.
My job. Last thing I'll ever do for her."
It was just after ten o'clock on a dull, overcast Los Angeles morning, with
tatters of mist lying out across the city.
The magnolia had once been the pride of the garden, dripping with blossom,
shading the bottom corner of the garden near where the land dropped away
toward the reservoir.
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Now it was a dried stump, the branches brittle as rice paper, the handful of
dead leaves carrying the familiar pinkish tint. But as Jim stooped to lay his
daughter's body on the earth, he noticed a few tiny green shoots near the
bottom of the shrub.
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He'd washed the frail, shrunken corpse using water that lay in the pool,
wiping her with an infinite tenderness, then dressing her in a clean
nightdress. Pink, with small yellow flowers, edged with white lace around the
hem and across the bodice.
The hair was matted, and he'd brushed out the tangles, parting it and putting
in a tortoiseshell clasp that had belonged to his great-grandmother.
Jim couldn't bear the thought of dirt falling on the still, placid face and
he'd taken a sheet from the linen cupboard and wrapped her very carefully in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]