Timothy Hallinan - A Nail Through the Heart

His sleepiness vanishes at the sight of his apartment door. It is wide open.

The boy, he thinks, the boy doesn't like air-conditioning. But even from the hall, he can see that something-everything-is wrong. He has the gun in his hand as he goes in.

The first thing he registers is the long slash in the couch, the stuffing exploding from it onto the floor like the cotton snow in the Christmas windows of Bangkok department stores. Yellow streaks across the wall announce the places where raw eggs shattered against it. The coffee table is on its side with one leg snapped off. The carpet where the boy likes to sit has been sliced and torn to expose the gray concrete beneath.

Why can't the world be soft?

The boy.

Rafferty runs down the hallway to Miaow's room and throws open the door. No one there, everything where it should be. The bunk beds are made. The pink T-shirt she gave him is the only thing out of place, wadded tightly on the floor. He picks it up, and it flutters to the carpet in pieces. It has been cut into ribbons.

And suddenly he knows, and his stomach shrivels until it is the size of a walnut and heavy as an anvil. He hurtles back through the hall, into the living room, and stops, his heart plummeting. The laptop is open, its screen bright and terrible.

The boy, he thinks. He was going to play Tetris. And then Rafferty realizes that he e-mailed Morrison, got up, and left the disk in the computer.

He hurries into the bathroom and, for the second time that day, he throws up.

He needs several frantic minutes to find the telephone number. He has had it for months on a pad next to the phone on the chance he might need it, but nothing is where it should be, and in his panic he picks the pad up and throws it aside and then chases it across the room, kicking things in front of him.

The boy glares at him from the computer screen on his desk. His hands are cuffed behind him, his feet separated by a pole like the ones that forced Doughnut's ankles apart. His eyes are wide and dry, glittering through his tangle of hair: Even then he had refused to weep.

That picture, on this screen, in this room. That disk in the computer. The boy's last chance to trust, and he finds that evil here.

I should have known. I should have known. The disk is on the floor, warped and blackened, partially torched with, Rafferty guesses, a disposable butane lighter, one of the dozens Rose has left behind. He dials the number on the pad and waits, swearing at each ring. The battery on the computer dies, and the screen goes black. A small mercy.

"Hello?" says a male voice on the other end, and Rafferty waits for a moment, struck dumb at the possibility he is making a disastrous mistake. If he talks to Miaow, she'll know something is wrong, and she'll demand to know what it is. He can't explain yet, doesn't know how to frame it, especially at this stage in their relationship. Adoption, for Christ's sake.

"Hello?"

On the other hand, if he doesn't say something, the boy will go get her. He will want to rescue her. From Rafferty, from what he thinks Rafferty is. It can't be risked. Whatever happens, Rafferty has to talk to her before the boy does.

It takes him less than two minutes to get through to the person he needs to talk to and make the arrangements: Miaow is to be kept there after school for an hour, or two if necessary, released to no one but him under any circumstances. She is not to be allowed on the playground. If she wants to know why, she is to be told he will explain it to her later.

When he's had time to think of something. After he's made things right with Superman.

He pulls the computer off the desk, yanking out the power cord, and throws it across the room.

As he runs onto the Silom sidewalk, all he can think is, At least I probably know where the boy is.

He sees him instantly.

The boy stands with his back to the street, pressed up against the chain-link fence that surrounds the school, watching the playground. He is once again all in blue-in the first clothes Rafferty bought him. Two very dirty smaller boys flank him, keeping lookout. Despite the tinted windows of his taxi, darkened against the heat of the day, it is all Rafferty can do to keep from shrinking out of sight.

Twenty or thirty feet away, a group of kids play with typical childlike violence, doing their level best to blind and maim each other, apparently immune to the noon heat. Miaow is not among them.

"Around the block," Rafferty says.

"Okay." The cab swings right, narrowly avoiding an oncoming van, and shoots up the street, hugging the middle to bypass the traffic in the lane nearest the curb. Cars and pedestrians scatter.

"Slower." Rafferty is studying the side of the school, which takes up much of the block. No sign of Miaow. No other boys loitering, waiting for something to happen.

"All the way around?" They are at the corner.

"All the way." A stretch of shop fronts intervenes, the sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. A few children, none of them Miaow. Be inside, be safe, he wills silently.

As they make the next right, Rafferty hands a wad of bills over the front seat. "Back to where we saw those three kids. Slow down, but don't stop. I'll get out while you're moving."

"Up to you. You have insurance?"

"There's no such thing as insurance."

The driver makes the last right, and Rafferty jumps out of the cab at a run. He is no more than ten yards from Superman when one of the smaller boys spots him and yells, and Superman glances over his shoulder and takes off, the other boys scattering in his slipstream. They head in different directions, apparently a standard drill, but Rafferty stays behind Superman, watches the long hair flowing in the sun as the boy lopes down the sidewalk, easily, effortlessly out-pacing him.

He wills his legs to pump faster, feeling Doughnut's cigarettes clawing at his throat. Chain-link blurs past. Superman takes the right that Rafferty's cab took, glancing back, running straight into the traffic. Rafferty follows, already gasping with the effort, as cars swerve to avoid him, their brakes a high screech like a diamond on glass.

A soi opens up on the left, and Superman streaks into it, lengthening his stride as though shifting gears, and Rafferty knows he will never catch the boy. He thinks for a despairing instant about giving up, but the boy leaps onto the curb and catches his foot, staggering for a moment, and Rafferty closes the gap by a few yards before the running boy gets his feet under him again. A shot of hope courses through Rafferty's veins, red and hot. He finds speed he didn't know he had.

Then he has to negotiate the curb himself, and he looks down to keep from stumbling, and when he looks up, the boy is gone.

He slows, irresolute, scanning the street. Two turned heads, adults, form a kind of wake that tells him which direction the boy took, and for the second time in a few days, Rafferty runs into an underground garage.

And thinks instantly, This is a mistake.

He hears feet scuffing behind him, five or six people by the sound of it, and he runs farther into the gloom of the garage, putting distance between him and them, trying to see Superman. The light coming through the door behind him dims and then brightens again, and he looks over his shoulder to see eight or ten children, none of them any older than Superman, crowding through it and separating into two groups. There are already four others, the first feet he heard, circling off to his right. He thinks, Coyotes.

"Boo!"

No answer, but something strikes his shoulder, sharp as a knife, and a stone clatters onto the concrete at his feet. Another missile whistles past his head, a chunk of cement as big as a child's fist, and bangs into the door of a car. Then an impact on his right elbow, and his arm goes numb. More cement.