In the storage shed at the back of Grandpa Teddy’s property, he sat on a stool in the gloom, holding the door open a few inches, watching the dark house. Sears had done a good job when they erected the shed, and it had served him without problem for years. But right now he would have cursed it if he had been a cursing man, because the rain pounding on the metal roof deafened him, as if he were standing in a giant snare drum inside an even more giant kettle drum.
He’d been on leave from his night gig for a week, ever since Jonah came home, which is why he had told George Yoshioka the fib about every restaurant reservation being sold out, so that the tailor wouldn’t come to see him play and discover he wasn’t there. Grandpa Teddy had begun to think that he might be a fool. Well, every man was a fool—how could it be otherwise in a fallen world?—but Teddy Bledsoe thought he might be an even bigger fool than he had ever previously imagined. He trusted the police, he really did. To a point. To an extent. With some reservations. You didn’t live more than half a century as a black man in this world and be completely trusting of authority. This was his house, his family; and if the police made a mistake, he would suffer the loss. There had been enough losses lately. He didn’t believe he could live through another one and still face the days ahead with his usual enthusiasm. But on this eighth night of his vigil, he thought perhaps the police were wrong when they predicted this Drackman character, given what was now known about his worthless life, would come busting in sooner than later. They had done some psychological profile and swore on it as Grandpa Teddy would have sworn on the Bible in a courtroom. But a profile was a guess—a bunch of guesses, really. It seemed now that every one of those guesses had been wrong.
Well, if after this night he called it quits, at least no one would know that he’d been playing detective or security guard, or whatever it might be that he thought he was doing. He’d left home every evening in his show tux. He’d driven to a service station and changed into clothes more suitable for a storage shed and for the rough-and-tumble encounter he anticipated. He’d returned by the weedy vacant lot that backed up to his property, scaled the fence as if he weren’t but a decade away from Social Security, and ducked into the shed to stand guard until it was time for him to change back into his tux and pretend to come home from a session on the bandstand.
Maybe something had gone wrong with his mind. A man could take only so much. When you lost your angel of a wife, when a grandson who should have had the world at his feet suddenly can’t walk on the feet that he has, when all those most precious to you in the world seemed to have their necks through the lunette of a guillotine, a man could be excused for going a little crazy, secretly changing clothes like Clark Kent becoming Superman, sneaking among the trash and trees in a weedy lot, hiding in a shed with a weapon he was loath to use.
He sighed and said softly, “Old man, you’re a musician, you aren’t muscle.”
102
Boy. I woke from a dream, but it seemed to me that the word had not been spoken in the world of sleep, that someone had whispered it in my ear.
I realized that I had left the penlight shining when I’d gone to sleep. The pale beam passed across the bedclothes … just to the right of an object I couldn’t identify, a shadowy roundness at the edge of the light.
Pushing with my left arm, I eased up from the pillow, reaching with my right hand for whatever lay there. I plucked the object off the sheet and knew at once what it was, even before I brought it into the light: the stuffed-toy eye.
“Snoop and liar,” Fiona Cassidy said.
I tried to cry out but couldn’t. My throat was like an organ pipe in which a grab knob had been engaged, cutting off the flow of air and sound.
Looming out of the dark, she switched on my bedside lamp and smiled at me. Neither kindness nor humor informed that smile.
She had cut her hair and dyed it and gotten a deep tan, but I would have recognized her if she’d made twice as many changes to her appearance. The steel edge of the switchblade gleamed in the light.
“Get in your wheelchair, crip.”
When I didn’t at once obey, she slashed the air in front of my face, and I flinched away from the flashing blade.
With contempt, she said, “There’s no juju in you, boy, and there never was. No juju in the fetishes you keep in that candy box.”
I almost reached to touch the Lucite heart that I wore under my pajamas, but I stopped myself, for I knew that she would understand and find the pendant and take it from me.
“Get in your chair, crip!”
103
Mr. Smaller reached the fifth floor without encountering anyone. At Apartment 5-C, the passkey smoothly opened the deadbolts of the double locks.