City of Darkness

Chapter FORTY-FIVE

8:23 PM



“I’m not sure where he went,” Emma said. “Perhaps our nerves have gone so bad we’ve imagined every man in the street is following us.”

“I know,” Leanna says. “And listen to those foghorns. We must have come full circle because we truly are near the docks.”

“Thank God,” Emma said. “When we find the cab we –“

But as they turned the final corner they came face to face with a man. Strange, Leanna thought, but it seems as if he’s waiting for us. Emma’s mind went even more into the sort of slow-motion abstraction that often accompanies shock and makes it feel dreamlike. Or perhaps she was turning pages in one of her father’s old storybooks. A bear was before them. He was standing with his weight equally on each foot and in a bit of a crouch, the paunch of his belly thrust forward.

The bear smiled.

And then he lunged.

Leanna tried to cry out but, before she could make a sound, the man’s arm swooped down, as swift and mechanical as a sickle, and lifted her straight up by the base of her throat. She gasped for air as she felt herself being pushed skyward until, when she struggled to open her eyes, she found herself staring down into his grinning face. Her feet kicked and dangled below her, as ineffectual as ship sails on a windless day. Emma, snapped free from her shock, let out a shrill scream and pounded at the back of the man. The sound echoed through the streets, and, although no one came to help, someone must have lit a light in one of the rooms overlooking the waterway for a pale yellow glow began to diffuse the darkness, allowing Emma to see. Leanna had stopped kicking and swung about like a rag doll, her feet grazing the rough boards of the dock.

She’s dead, Emma thought. He’s broken her neck. Using all her strength she leapt on the man’s back and threw both of her arms around his face, gouging her fingers into his eyes and biting the fleshy overhang at the base of his skull. She was not strong enough to pull him down, but the pain in his eyes and neck had the desired effect. He released Leanna to the ground and staggered blindly while Emma crossed her hands, grabbed her own wrists, and simply dropped. The dead weight of her body hanging behind him made the big man sway and she kicked as hard as she could. She was screaming, screaming for every pain she’d ever suffered, every loss, every fear. Her voice echoed up and down the waterfront.

This time Trevor heard her. He had been pacing the docks since he’d arrived minutes before and now he began running toward the sound of her voice, blowing his police whistle in short hard blasts. Other coppers in the area picked up the signal and began to blow their whistles too, converging on the pier. Davy Mabrey, coming from the west, was among them.

Micha had regained his balance but, since Emma was hanging down the back of his body, he was unable to reach her. He whirled sharply, a move that nearly sent her spinning off of him, and finally slammed his own back, and thus hers, into a piling. Emma’s head hit the boards and she slid to the ground, her mouth full of blood and her vision gone cottony.

It was as if she was looking down at herself, as if this was all happening to someone else, a substitute Emma, another person. It would be easy to give into it and just sink from this time and place. Easy to release her grasp on this sad life and fall into some bigger, brighter world. Emma let her head roll back. She had sat at her mother’s bed at the end, had seen the startled look that had come across the woman’s features with her last earthly exhalation. Emma had always wondered what this final revelation had been, but now she knew. Had Mary seen this? Had her father or her brother?

It is easier to die than to live. That is the great surprise.





8:25 PM



Severin drew the blade of the knife lightly across his own palm.

“You did not know?” He said it as a question but meant it as a statement. “Did not know I was one they are looking for? Looking for a very long time.”

Cecil inched back, knocking over a trash can, his boots slipping over the piles of fish bones and slimy fruit. He wanted to tell the man he didn’t see him, that he would never tell anyone they had been here, but his voice seemed to have left him. He could do no more than shake his head.

Severin stepped toward him slowly. “And now at last I am caught,” he said. “What are we to do about this?”

And then, like the vengeance of angels, a crescendo of police whistles began to rise up all around them. Not one or two but a dozen, coming from all directions. Severin’s dark eyes flickered and he hesitated. Just long enough to allow Cecil to turn.



8:25 PM



“What’s that sound?” Tom said. “It’s coming from the water.”

“Get there when you can,” John said. He bent to slide Tom from his back and then he began to run.



8:26 PM



The three figures before him were images from a nightmare. The giant at the mouth of the dock was Micha - the man Abrams had served up to him on a platter and that he had been fool enough to release. Micha had thrown Emma’s limp form to the pavement as casually as a man shucks a coat. Even as Trevor ran down the dock with his whistle screaming, Micha did not pause at the sound or hesitate in his task. He left Emma and turned toward Leanna, who was struggling to sit up. Trevor dropped the whistle from his lips and began to simply roar the same word over and over again. The darkness around him had a new name. Jack. Jack. Jack.

The big man moved with an almost leisurely grace, stooping over Leanna, lifting a shank of her hair, which glowed snow-white in the streetlight, pulling back his hand….but Trevor saw that Emma had somehow gotten to her feet, was running at the man, throwing her small body against his, and in just that moment Leanna also managed to get her knees beneath her, to push up from the dock like a diver from a board. The collective movement of their bodies disturbed the man’s equilibrium. Just for a moment, but it was enough. They weaved and staggered, six arms about each other, in a bizarre triangular dance, and they were moving down the mouth of the pier, over the water. The man’s arm rose, there was a flash of silver in the sky, and then Leanna was slung to his right, toward the dock, and Emma to his left, toward the pier. Trevor was running, pulling off his coat, screaming, and at last someone seemed to hear him. Emma turned, stumbling, and her eyes locked with Trevor’s for a split second, just as she made one final grab at the giant’s arm, just as she was starting to fall.

Leanna was slowly regaining her breath. She rolled to her back, looked up at the sky. Her throat ached, her vision was blurred, and all there seemed to be in the world was the noise of the whistles, sharp and insistent, and beneath them, another sound. She heard the splash of a body falling into water, then another, and finally, a few seconds later, a third.