CHAPTER TWO
Brooklyn, the same day.
At the worn end of the day, they sat on the wooden steps of the old man's back porch, behind his frame house on Avenue J, drinking a homemade ale.
“You are not going to pick up the dog?” Cronin asked, in his faint German-Yiddish accent.
“No, Cronin, you'll have to keep him a while longer, if you can,” Bleak said, holding his glass of beer up to the failing light.
“Was not good, keeping a dog on a cabin-cruiser boat.”
“He stayed with Donner part of the time. But I can't leave him over there—I have to move the boat. Or maybe abandon it.”
“Abandon? That is your home, that boat!” He shook his head. “Ach. Gabriel, you are like a grasshopper with the jumping, your way of doing.”
The beer had a strong, thoughtful aftertaste. Cronin had brewed it himself—Bleak sometimes called him Der Brewmeister, to which Cronin would only reply, “Your German, as ever, is atrocious.”
“Just watch the dog for me, please, Cronin, I'll be back at some point. I don't think the feds know about you, but if they come, tell them anything they want to know, don't try to protect me.” The bowed planks of the porch steps overlooking the overgrown backyard creaked whenever they shifted their weight. They could hear kids shouting, throwing a baseball on the street; jays made raucous sounds in the maple tree at the back fence, as if they were replying to the creaking boards.
“Too much jumping, Gabe. You talk like they're the Nazis, these people. This is not like that... you cannot know how bad that was.”
“I know it's not that bad. Not yet. But...we did suspend a good many basic rights after the last attack.”
The old man shrugged. “Not as bad. You must trust me when I say, not as bad.”
“I do trust you. You're the only one I trust. That's why I'm leaving Muddy with you.”
Muddy Waters was Bleak's middle-size, mottled mutt, his legs stubby, his body long; no one quite sure of the mixture. Maybe some dachshund, some Jack Russell terrier. Bleak could hear the dogs? snuffling around the side of the house.
Cronin seemed thinner these days, to Bleak. He knew the old man would never admit being seriously ill. Old Cronin sat there in his T-shirt and oil-stained dun-colored trousers, a mason jar of ale between his two hands, gazing out over a maze of fenced-off backyards—he'd been trying to fix the lawn mower, in his leaning shed of a garage, when Bleak arrived.
Bleak whistled and the dog came bounding around the corner, almost disappearing in the long grass of the yard, his snout visible as he poised to look quiveringly up at Bleak, whom he loved unreservedly. “Hey, dog—you stay with Cronin, he's gonna feed you more than I do.”
“Probably that is so.” Cronin chuckled, scratching an age-spotted wrist. The same wrist that had the blue numbers on it from the concentration camp, tattooed on him when he was a small child.
Cronin was the widower father of Lieutenant Isaac Preiss, who'd died on patrol with Bleak, in Afghanistan. Cronin was almost Gabriel's father too; and old enough to be his grandfather. They'd fallen into the roles, each a substitute for the other, quite easily, when Bleak had come to see him after his discharge. Come, ostensibly, to bring Cronin stories of his son's time in the Army Rangers.
Bleak had thought about telling Cronin that he had seen Isaac Preiss—that he had seen him since Isaac's death. But there was too little comfort there because Isaac's spirit, dimly seen, as if it were calling from a long ways away, had been trying to tell him something. To warn him. But Bleak wasn't sure what the message was. Isaac had been conscious enough to move on to the next world—had gone beyond “the veil,” unlike the confused, muttering ghosts that haunted this world. Most spirits beyond the veil could rarely speak from their side to ours. Not easily. So-called mediums were such liars.
And Cronin knew only a little about what Bleak could do. What he had been able to do since that day when the dead had initiated him, one October, many years ago, back in Oregon, at the age of thirteen.
“I wish it was last summer again,” Bleak said impulsively. He'd had a girlfriend, Wendy, last summer; he'd played softball with the bar team, and Wendy, and Cronin, had come to the games. Playing softball, bowling, playing pool—those things anchored him in the mortal world; kept him from drifting, mentally, into the Hidden. Helped him maintain that vital compartmentalization. And it felt good to be out in a park on a warm day, feeling all the parts of his body working together; the satisfaction of throwing a pretty good pitch. Once, though, in a rushed moment trying to stop someone from stealing a base, he'd thrown a ball to a ghost playing shortstop. Hadn't realized it was the ghost of a softball player; the ghost had a glove and everything. Embarrassing. Of course the ball had gone right through the glove. To the living players, who couldn't see the ghost, Bleak had just thrown the ball wildly wrong. But still...it made him wince, thinking of it.
“No good to think of the past, and wish for it, this an old man learns,” Cronin said. “But that was good, you playing in Central Park. You were happy. You don't see that girl anymore? Nice girl.” Bleak shook his head. “No.” And he didn't want to talk about her. “I'd better go.” “But where do you go, now? You will call?”
“Sure. I gave you that cell phone. Just keep it charged. No one but me has the number. I'll call that. Not the landline.”
“Sometimes I think you're hallucinating, boy,” Cronin muttered, shaking his head. “You have to hide, all the time. And for what?”
“You want me to show you again?”
“No. No! I don't want to see that again. Not...no. When my time comes, God will show me, you are not to show me. That is the commandment, the mitzvah, to wait for God to show Himself, His way More beer? This is a masterpiece for me, this beer.”
“Still got half a glass. I'm trying to drink less.”
“Moderation in all things, this is smart.”
“To hell with moderation.” Bleak drained his beer and stood up. “I'll put this in the sink. I've gotta go.”
“But where?”
“Honest, it's best you don't know. And I'm not a hundred percent sure.”
“You think you can run from them, who run the whole country?” Cronin stood, his back audibly creaking. He only came up to Bleak's collarbone.
“Only for a while. I'll make some kind of deal with them, maybe. When I come back, I'll cut your grass for you.”
Cronin smiled sadly and Bleak saw the old man had lost another tooth. The corners of his small brown eyes crinkled. “Sure. I fix the machine, you will cut. And we will drink beer.”
***
A FEW HOURS LATER. The sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.
There was a marina in Hoboken, New Jersey, near where Riverview Drive meets Harbor Drive. It's across the river from the Westside Highway, and Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan. Most of the time, Bleak lived in the marina, in a tired, old thirty-five-foot Chris-Craft fiberglass cabin cruiser. Unregistered, so he couldn't be traced to it. Technically you weren't supposed to live in the marina either, but he had a friend, Donner, an old stoner who ran the place from his combo office and studio apartment overlooking the docks, and Donner pretended he didn't know Bleak lived there. He valued Bleak's chess game—Bleak could usually be counted on to lose, in the end, even though Donner was smoking pot while he played. But then, Bleak didn't try very hard to win.
Looking at the marina, now, from the screen of trees in the park across Harbor Boulevard, Bleak didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Didn't see any police cars, didn't see any obvious CCA agents over there. But they knew who he was. They'd been tracking him. So they might know where he lived, registered or not. They could be waiting in his cabin cruiser. Or watching from the small yacht tied up in the next berth. They could be a lot of places.
And he felt something. A faint sense that someone close by was thinking about him—and not Donner.
He was cautious enough to keep a small metal boat tied up, little more than a skiff with a one-cylinder, barely functional outboard motor, about a quarter mile downstream on the Hudson. There was enough gas in that little vessel to get up to the cabin cruiser, check it out from the water where they might not see him coming. He'd feel them for sure, if they were in there, once he got close enough.
He looked around, before leaving the park, though he knew they hadn't spotted him. If anyone was looking at him in any fixed and purposeful way, he'd have felt it.
***
IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT o'clock when Bleak got the boat out from under the crumbling pier downstream, started it upriver, hugging the Jersey shore. It seemed to take a long time to push against the current up to the marina. He stayed inshore, in the long shadows of the buildings with the sunset behind them.
The boat rocked in the wash from a barge. He was tired and didn't want to end up rowing. Now and then the boat's putt-putting engine missed a putt, like an old man's failing heart. And he wondered how long Cronin would be around for him.
The river oozed past. The field of the Hidden whispered.
Usually he kept his consciousness of the Hidden bottled up. But being out on the river, in the slow, contemplative living stream, his senses tended to flow out of him, to widen, to reach out...
Until finally—a face looked up at him, from just under the dark surface of the river.
He was used to seeing them out here. Lots of guys had been dropped into the river, disposed of, i weighted but alive when the water closed over their head. Funny to see the clean-shaven man in his suit, complete with a wide, checked tie; his hair smoothed back, his features quite intact, his prominent nose not nibbled by fish. His eyes looking at Bleak from under a thin sheet of dirty water. But he wasn't a corpse; only a confused ghost.
“Pal,” Bleak said, “that tie is way out of fashion. You've been under there too long. You gotta get to a mall.”
The man's mouth moved. No bubbles came out of it, no sound.
“Can't hear you, bro,” Bleak said. “Just let go and drift with the stream. Your body's long gone. Just drift, and once you get far enough from the spot where you died, someone'll tell you where to go next.”
The man sank away, emanating disappointment. Bleak remembered another river ghost, a couple years back, when he'd been out in his cabin cruiser. The perfectly preserved body of a chunky, bald man in a jogging suit, maybe from the 1990s, talking to him. Unheard. He had decided to see what this one had to say, and he'd tuned in to its mind—to its mindless muttering, really. An uncomfortable, tiring, risky process. And he'd heard, “Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him off, he don't have to do nothing. I'm gonna get all the shit for him. My wife took it and sold it in L.A., it's gone, but I'm gonna get some more, I'm gonna replace all seven ounces, he don't have to do nothing. Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him. Tell Buddy... “
“Buddy already did you,” Bleak had tried to tell him. “Or somebody sent by Buddy. You're already dead. Hey, if you're gonna be a ghost, try to remember yourself slimmer and, like, in a better outfit.” Bleak sometimes tried to kid the ghosts out of their self-centeredness. But they clung to it— though their fixations kept them ghosts.
“Tell Buddy I'm going to pay him off, he don't have to do nothing. I'm gonna get all the shit for him. My wife...”
Feeling headachy and sick to his stomach, Bleak had cut the connection, like hanging up on a phone call.
Remembering the jogging-suit ghost, Bleak shook himself, looking around to reboot his mind. He was really good at keeping bad memories at bay. It was a skill a combat vet learned.
Bleak looked up from the river, saw that he was about to reach the marina. His cruiser, the HMS Crackbrain, was a wedge of darkness against the backlights of the marina, rocking gently on its mooring. He saw no one on it. Felt no one watching him, not from anywhere.
He cut the engine, put the oars in the oarlocks, and rowed the rest of the way. He was sweating despite the evening cool on the river. He could see lights on at Donner's place, overlooking the dock, ashore. More than one light on. But if Bleak went up to Donner's place, asked him what he'd seen, he might involve him. If he was under surveillance, they might take Donner in as some kind of accessory, or even a suspected Shadow Community rogue.
Bleak shipped the oars and let the boat drift up to the dock, near the prow of the cabin cruiser. He sat quietly in the inky darkness of its shadow, both hands holding the rope that held the cruiser to the dock, and closed his eyes. He extended his senses into the Hidden, enlarged the field of his awareness to take in the Crackbrain—and immediately sensed someone in the boat. No one should be there. He'd locked it, and no one else but Donner had a key.
Whoever this was, it wasn't Donner. But a faint fibrillation of familiarity tingled from the person in the cabin cruiser. And something else. Whoever it was...
Was wide-awake. Tensely aware. And waiting for him.
Instinct told him to get away from the dock—from any CCA backup that might be waiting nearby. And do it quietly.
But Bleak tied the metal rowboat to the line dangling from the aft of the cabin cruiser and clambered up the built-in ladder, into the larger boat. He paused on the slightly rocking deck, near the cowl for the inboard engine, listening. Nothing but the sound of a distant siren from the city, the lapping of small waves on the fiberglass hull.
He moved down the steps to the door of the cruiser's cabin—and saw that the door was slightly open. He stepped back, curled his right hand, built up power—the river helped, immediately, as running water always did—and readied himself to create an energy bullet.
The door suddenly popped open. A willowy figure came sinuously through, her eyes glowing with power.
He stared. “Shoella!”
A tall, slender black woman, her hair bristly with dreadlocks. She glared at him for a long moment—then gold teeth gleamed amidst a broad white smile.
“Bleak. Where yat? Pigeon Lady told me what happened today. If they're onto y'alls, maybe they onto us.” She was a mix of Creole and other New Orleans strains; had a soft Cajun accent, though she'd been living in the North for almost ten years.
He released the energy bullet and shrugged. “If they're onto all of us, maybe they're following you, Shoella. Maybe they followed you here.”
She shook her head. “We both know when we being followed. But cher darlin'? I made up my mind. You got to meet with our people...and decide whose side you're on.”
She came a step closer, into the light from the marina. Shoella was a little older and taller than Bleak; she was almost storklike, six foot one, bony, with ropy dreads past her collarbone, a green-and-red silk Chinese mandarin jacket, a wraparound skirt of red silk, high-top, dark green sneakers, jangling copper bracelets. A sardonic expression on a faunlike, cocoa-colored face of indeterminate age. Bleak didn't know her well, though a flirtation had existed between them—at times it had seemed to break through flirtation to something more. He figured her for somewhere past thirty-five. Except for her tallness, she was not the exotic woman some expected to meet. If she was summoning ancestral spirits, or using the strange birdlike familiar that followed her, though, she took on a different aspect. She seemed to grow in bulk and density, and gravitas.
Just now she was strolling up to the railing, to gaze out at the oozing-slow water, her bracelets jangling, singing softly to herself. Watching a barge pushing by way out on the river. Its wake slowly, inexorably worked its way over to them and lapped on the pylons.
“What I want to know,” she said, “were they just after you, or they after all of us? What do you figure?”
“Right now, I'm trying to figure out how those high-top sneakers go with all that silk. Does, though. The feds are after all of us, Shoella. You were right about that.”
“Then it's time to call a meeting.” She made an odd twitchy gesture at the air, and in response a strange cry, and a flapping sound, came from above.
Bleak glanced up, saw a darkness shaped like a large bird—a very large bird—descending toward them. Something dark, big as a large seagull, settled on her shoulder. The Bird That No One Knew, some in the ShadowComm called it. Shoella called it Yorena. Referred to the familiar as a she though it was doubtful the creature had real gender.
The bird was dark crimson. Very dark. She was flecked with jet and a lugubrious yellow, sprayed across her belly; her beak was like a falcon's. An ornithologist had seen Shoella with the familiar and had begged to examine the creature, but when he'd stepped closer, Yorena viciously attacked him, bloodied his cheeks, and drove him away.
She wasn't exactly a real bird; she didn't eat or leave droppings. Sometimes she shed small feathers, but if you put one in your pocket, the molt was gone, soon after, like a piece of ice.
“Time to call a meeting,” Shoella repeated, to herself now.
She whispered something to Yorena and the familiar took to the air, in a dark flurry of purpose. Shoella muttering, “And laissezles bons temps rouler.”