Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“Heading in which direction?”

“I don’t know. Fan out your men.”

“We’re rolling.”

Angie and I took my back stairs three at a time and vaulted the porch railing into my back yard, guns drawn. He could have gone in three directions. If he’d gone west through back yards, he’d still be doing it because there wasn’t a cross street on this side for four city blocks. If he’d gone north toward the school, he would have run into the FBI. That left south to the block behind mine, or east to Dorchester Avenue.

I took south, Angie went east.

And neither of us found him.

And neither did Devin or Oscar.

And none of the FBI had any luck either.

By nine, a helicopter flew over the neighborhood and they’d brought in dogs, and agents were doing house-to-house searches. My neighbors weren’t too keen on me last year when I nearly brought a gang war to their doorsteps; I could only imagine what ancient Celtic curses they were hurling at my soul tonight.

Evandro Arujo had bypassed the security system by posing as Lyle Dimmick. Any neighbor looking out a window and seeing a ladder propped up by my third-floor windows would just have assumed Ed Donnegan now owned my building too and had hired Lyle to paint it.

The motherfucker had been inside my home.

The eyes, it was assumed, belonged to Peter Stimovich, who’d been found without his own, a detail Bolton had omitted.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said.

“Kenzie,” he said with his perpetual sigh, “I’m not paid to keep you in the loop. I’m paid to bring you into it only insofar as it suits our needs.”

Under the eyes, which a federal ME lifted gelatinously from my cupboard and placed in separate plastic bags, I’d been left another note, a white envelope, and a large stack of flyers. The note said, “sonicetoseeUagain” in the same typeface as the first two.

Bolton took the envelope before I could open it, then looked at the other notes I’d received in the last month. “How come you never came forward with these?”

“I didn’t know they were from him.”

He handed them to a lab tech. “Kenzie and Gennaro’s prints are on file with Agent Erdham. Take the bumper stickers too.”

“What do you make of the flyers?” Devin said.

There were over a thousand of them in two neat stacks bound by rubber bands, some yellowed by age, some wrinkled, some only ten days old. They all showed photographs in the left corner of missing children, with vital statistics listed below the photos, and they all bore the same legend: Have You Seen Me?

Well, no, I hadn’t. Over the years I’d received hundreds of these flyers in the mail, I suppose, and I always looked closely just to be sure, before tossing them in the trash, but in all that time I’d never seen a face I recognized. Receiving them once a week or so, it was easy to forget about them, but now, leafing through them with rubber gloves bound over my hands so tightly I could feel the sweat bleeding from the pores of my palms, it was over-whelming.

Thousands of them. Gone. A country unto themselves. A half-dreamt litter of misplaced lives. So many of them, I assumed, were dead. Others, I’m sure, had been found, always worse off than when they’d disappeared. The rest of them were cast adrift and floating like a traveling carnival across our landscape, passing like blips through the hearts of our cities, sleeping on stone and grates and discarded mattresses, hollow-cheeked and sallow-skinned, eyes blank and hair filled with nits.

“It’s the same as the bumper stickers,” Bolton said.

“How so?” Oscar said.

“He wants Kenzie to share his postmodern malaise. That the world is off its hinges and can’t be reattached, that a thousand voices shout inane opinions at one another and not one will change any of the others. That we are constantly at cross purposes and there’s no holistic, shared accumulation of knowledge. That children disappear every day and we say, ‘How tragic. Pass the salt.’” He looked at me. “Sound right?”

“Maybe.”

Angie shook her head. “No. Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of it, but it isn’t all of his message. Agent Bolton, you’ve accepted that we probably have two killers, not just one little Evandro Arujo on our hands. Correct?”

He nodded.

“This second one, he’s been waiting or, hell, incubating for two decades. That’s the prevailing theory, right?”

“That’s it.”

She nodded. She lit a cigarette and held it up. “I’ve

tried to quit smoking several times. You know how much effort that takes?”

“You know how much I would have appreciated it at this moment if you’d succeeded?” Bolton said, ducking from the cloud of smoke which filtered over the kitchen.

“Too bad.” She shrugged. “My point is that we all have our addiction of choice. The one thing that gets us to our soul. That is us, in a way. What couldn’t you live without?”

“Me?” he said.

“You.”

He smiled and looked away, slightly embarrassed. “Books.”

“Books?” Oscar laughed.

He turned on him. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go on, Agent Bolton. You the man.”

“What kind of books?” Angie said.

“The great ones,” Bolton said, a little sheepish. “Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Shakespeare, Flaubert.”

“And if they were outlawed?” Angie said.

“I’d break the law,” Bolton said.

“You wild man,” Devin said. “I am appalled.”

“Hey.” Bolton glared at him.

“What about you, Oscar?”

“Food,” Oscar said and patted his belly. “Not health food, but real tasty heart-attack food. Steaks, ribs, eggs, chicken-fried steak and gravy.”

Devin said, “What a shock.”

“Damn,” Oscar said. “Just went and made myself hungry.”

“Devin?”

“Cigarettes,” he said. “Booze probably.”

“Patrick?”

“Sex.”

“You,” Oscar said, “are a whore, Kenzie.”

“Fine,” Angie said. “These are the things that get us through, make life bearable. Cigarettes, books, food, cigarettes again, booze, and sex. That’s us.” She tapped the stack of flyers. “What about him? What can’t he go without?”