Torrez didn’t want to invite the man into the house. “What did the ransom note for your daughter say?”
“It said, Juan-Manuel Ortega—that’s me—I have Elizabeth, and I will kill her and take all her blood unless you induce Terry Torrez to come to me and him give me the ransom blood instead.”
“Call the police,” Torrez said. “That’s a bluff, about taking her blood. Why would he want a little girl’s blood? When did this happen? Every minute—”
Juan-Manuel Ortega opened his mouth very wide, as if to pronounce some big syllable, then closed it. “My Elizabeth,” he said, “she—killed her sister last year. My rifle was in the closet—she didn’t know, she’s a child, she didn’t know it was loaded—”
Torrez could feel that his eyebrows were raised. Yes she did, he thought; she killed her sister deliberately, and broke her own soul doing it, and the kidnapper knows it even if you truly don’t.
Your daughter’s a murderer. She’s like me.
Still, her blood—her broken, blunting soul—wouldn’t be accessible to the kidnapper, the way Torrez’s would be, unless…
“Has your daughter—” He had spoken too harshly, and tried again. “Has she ever used magic?” Or is her soul still virginal, he thought.
Ortega bared his teeth and shrugged. “Maybe! She said she caught her sister’s ghost in my electric shaver. I—I think she did. I don’t use it anymore, but think I hear it in the nights.”
Then her blood will do for the kidnapper what mine would, Torrez thought. Not quite as well, since my soul is surely more opaque—older and more stained by the use of magic—but hers will do if he can’t get mine.
“Here is my phone number,” said Ortega, now shoving a business card at Torrez and talking too rapidly to interrupt, “and the kidnapper has your number. He wants only you. I am leaving it in your hands. Save my daughter, please.”
Then he turned around and ran down the walkway to a van parked behind Torrez’s Toyota. Torrez started after him, but the sun-glare in his bad left eye made him uncertain of his footing, and he stopped when he heard the van shift into gear and start away. The man’s wife must have been waiting behind the wheel.
I should call the police myself, Torrez thought as he lost sight of the van in the brightness. But he’s right, the police would take the kidnapping seriously, but not the ransom. The kidnapper doesn’t want money—he wants my blood, me.
A living girl! he thought. I don’t save living people, I save ghosts. And I don’t even do that anymore.
She’s like me.
He shuffled back into the house, and set the cloth doll on the kitchen counter, sitting up against the toaster. Almost without thinking about it, he took the pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and lit one with his Bic lighter, then stubbed it out on the stovetop and laid it on the tile beside the doll.
The tip of the cigarette glowed again, and the telephone rang. He just kept staring at the doll and the smoldering cigarette and let the phone ring.
The answering machine clicked in, and he heard the woman’s recorded voice say, “No one is available to take your call, he had me on his TV, Daddy, so I could change channels for him. ‘Two, four, eleven,’ and I’d change them.”
Torrez became aware that he had sat down on the linoleum floor. Her ghost had never found a way to speak when he and his ex-wife had had possession of it. “I’m sorry, Amelia,” he said hoarsely. “It would have killed me to buy you back. They don’t want money, they—”
“What?” said the voice of the caller. “Is Mr. Torrez there?”
“Rum he gave me, at least,” said Amelia’s voice. “It wouldn’t have killed you, not really.”
Torrez got to his feet, feeling much older than his actual forty years. He opened the high cupboard and saw her bottle of 151-proof rum still standing up there beside the stacked china dishes he never used. He hoisted the bottle down and wiped dust off it.
“I’m going to tell him how rude you are,” said the voice on the phone, “this isn’t very funny.” The line clicked.
“No,” Torrez said as he poured a couple of ounces of rum into a coffee cup. “It wouldn’t have killed me. But it would have made a mindless…it would have made an idiot of me. I wouldn’t have been able to…work, talk, think.” Even now I can hardly make sense of the comics in the newspaper, he thought.
“He had me on his TV, Daddy,” said Amelia’s voice from the answering machine. “I was his channel-changer.”
Torrez set the coffee cup near the doll, and felt it vibrate faintly just as he let go of the handle. The sharp alcohol smell became stronger, as if some of the rum had been vaporized.
“And he gave me candy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Torrez absently, “I don’t have any candy.”
“Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.” Torrez had always given her Reese’s Pieces, but before now she had not been able to tell him what she preferred.
“How can you talk?”