56
ANSON
Vincent wasn’t happy about waking early.
He was less happy when we showed him the drawing.
The three of us were huddled at a corner table in the cafeteria.
Although there were no windows and I couldn’t see the sun, I knew it was rising.
All around us, the Quick began to wake. People stumbled out from the shadows, the dark places where they tucked away at night, yawning, wiping eyes.
Some laughing. Others talking low. Some padded down the halls to the restrooms; others went in search of food.
The Quick always seemed the fullest in the mornings, after everyone came home to roost.
Vincent held the sketch with two hands, his meaty fingers twisted around the edges, pulling the paper so tight, it was a wonder it didn’t rip in half. He looked up at both of us. “You know this means nothing, right?”
I had told him about Detective Moss. Where she’d taken me.
What she showed me. The picture found on the sidewalk.
Paul explained how we had walked through the horrifying events of my last night at home, how he’d used his drawings to pull the memories out of me.
Piece together what I couldn’t recall. I found myself nodding along, telling Vincent how it all came back, every second.
“You know this freak has a crazy memory,” Paul told him. “When he’s firing on all cylinders, he can tell you how many pimples were on the ass of some aspiring starlet in a porno he watched three years ago.”
“I don’t watch—”
He waved me off. “You know what I mean. He doesn’t forget anything. He’s like an elephant.”
Vincent looked at him stone-cold. “He’s flat out gotten lost in his own head while talking to us, and when he comes out of it, he’s got no memory of what he said or did. You’ve seen him do it. We both have. That sound stable to you?”
“I didn’t say he was stable. I said he has a good memory.”
“Look,” I told them both. “She was there. She took the picture. I’m sure of it.” I tapped the drawing. “This is exactly what I saw.”
“Or,” Vincent shot back, “you squeezed that brain of yours until this scene oozed out, then your mind dropped in a familiar face just because you needed to see something.”
“Hey Bishop, you’re famous!”
The three of us turned to find Ruddy coming through the door.
He tossed a newspaper across the room. It landed in the middle of our table and slid to me.
The headline read, “ANOTHER VICTIM, ANOTHER DAY WITH NO ANSWERS.” There was a photograph of the burned-out SUV with Detective Moss and me standing at the open door. I was looking directly at the camera.
“Fuck,” Vincent muttered, twisting the newspaper around to get a better look. With his free hand, he tucked Paul’s sketch in his pocket before Ruddy could see it.
Paul leaned over and scanned the text. “Double fuck. Check this part out: ‘Clearly baffled, the police are bringing in children to aid in the investigation. How long before they start parading psychics around area crime scenes in hopes of a break?’”
My heart gave a hard thump. “She did this on purpose.”
“Huh?” Vincent frowned.
“Detective Moss,” I told him. “They found that photograph of me on the sidewalk, then she brought me down there. She walked me right up to that SUV. She knew the press would get a shot. She wanted them to.”
Vincent stared at me blankly. He didn’t get it, but Paul did. He muttered, “The killer had your picture, and she wants the killer to know you’re in town.”
“What, like bait?” Vincent asked.
Ruddy dropped down into one of the empty seats. “So you’re what, some kind of informant now? Are you a narc? That won’t go over too well around here.”
The lights above caught the silver of the hoop in his nose and glistened. I tried not to look at it. “I’m not a narc.”
“But you’re helping them, right?” He tapped at the photograph. “That detective? You’re her informant?”
“Get lost, Ruddy,” Vincent told him without looking up from the newspaper. “Now.”
“Whatever.” Ruddy popped out of the chair and went to another table with Pudge and four other people I’d seen around, but didn’t know. When he spoke to them in low whispers, gesturing back at me, I turned away.
Vincent read the rest of the text. “This is really fucking bad.”
“Does it say his name?” Paul asked.
“No. They just call him a minor. No name. That doesn’t matter, though.
A lot of people are going to see this. The wrong people.
They know exactly who he is. If they haven’t figured out where we’ve been hiding, it’s not going to take them long to figure it out.
It says the killer is targeting homeless from the Quick. ”
“The last girl he took wasn’t from the Quick,” I told him. “I’ve never seen her around here.”
Vincent shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is the paper says she was from the Quick, and it’s right under a photograph of your ugly-ass mug staring at the camera. You might as well have been holding up a sign that said, ‘Come get me.’ We need to leave. Today. Now.”
“The Kid’s not in any condition to travel,” Paul reminded us. “It might be another week before he’s even allowed out of that bed.”
Vincent said nothing to that.
Paul tugged the newspaper away from him. “We can’t leave him here. Not with what’s coming. Not after everything he’s already been through. He won’t make it. It’ll kill him.”
“Paul’s right,” I said. “We can’t do that. You know what will happen to him. And where would we go? We still don’t know where Guyon is.”
“Anywhere but here,” Vincent said. “That’s where we’d go. Anywhere but here.” He looked up and frowned. “Christ, why is this place filling up so fast?”
He was right. At least half the residents of the Quick were in the room, with more streaming in through the door. All the tables were full, and people began lining the walls, huddled in groups. Whispering. Anxious.
“Stash called a meeting,” an older woman named Lumen said, taking the last seat at our table. “You mind?”
I shook my head.
Lumen used a walking stick on account of a bout with polio as a child.
Her cane looked old enough to come from the first tree chopped down when Charleston was born.
Lisco had told me she had perfected the art of begging in the streets, and with more than forty years of it behind her, she’d saved up nearly half a million dollars, which she either kept in a hole behind the corner QuickMart or an account with Morgan Stanley, depending on who you asked.
There must have been something in Vincent’s face because she gave him a quick look, then stood. “You boys look like you’d prefer not to have company.” She dragged her chair over to another table and settled in between two others.
A hush fell over the room as Stash came in with Meagan at his side. Both of them made their way to the front of the room.
Stash held up his hands to silence the anxious voices before saying, “I’ll make this fast, and I guarantee none of you will like it.”