James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“You did.”

“No! Tell me who it was.”

“Me.”

“Who made you into such a little slut?”

“I did.”

“No!” he shouted, emerging from his thoughts. “That’s the wrong answer!”

The outburst made him stop, and he worried that his voice might have been heard outside the cellar. The girl looked up from the bed, her eyes wide with fear.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

He knew she hadn’t, but the anger inside him was uncontrollable. Girls blaming themselves used to work for him, but not anymore. Not after what had happened in Mogadishu.

A scream-not the girl’s-cut through the silence as the closet door flew open. It was as if the Dark had been hit by a charging rhinoceros. He was suddenly on the floor, flat on his back. The weight of his attacker was on his chest, and a pair of very strong hands was at his throat. He gasped for air, but his windpipe was closed.

There was another scream-it was the girl this time-and the Dark had just enough oxygen flowing to his brain to process what was happening to him. His eyes were bulging, his head was on the verge of exploding, and the man with his hands around his throat was obviously not taking prisoners. The Dark hadn’t come this far to die on the cellar floor. His backpack was within reach, right where it had fallen. Even though it had seemed heavy a minute earlier, he found the strength to grab it by one strap and launch it from the floor with the force of a catapult.

Something cracked inside the backpack-or maybe it was the attacker’s skull. The grip on his throat eased for an instant, as if the blow had dazed his attacker, and the Dark seized the moment. He pushed with all his strength and sent the man flying across the room. But he came right back at the Dark, and the momentum sent them both crashing into the wall. A hot wet spray slapped the Dark across the face.

Am I bleeding?

The man grabbed the Dark by the hair and slammed his head against the floor-once, twice, a third time. Each time, the Dark felt that hot spray on his face, but each blow was weaker than the last. With the fourth, his attacker fell backward, a battered heap.

It’s not my blood!

The Dark tried to push himself up from the floor, but the cellar was awhirl, and he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even turn his head. He thought he saw the girl standing over him, but he was barely able to focus. She stepped past him. The Dark heard her voice, but she wasn’t speaking to him. The words didn’t register, but her tone was one of concern. She wasn’t talking to a stranger.

She knows the guy.

It was his last conscious thought before the dimly lit room turned completely dark.

Jack went out looking-for what, he wasn’t sure. For Vince. For Shada. For answers. He was finding none of them.

His coat was barely warm enough for a Miami winter, and his new leather gloves were touring around London in the backseat of the cab that he and Vince had grabbed at the airport. But he braved the chill, needing to get out of the hotel room and clear his head. Walking certain areas of the East End after dark was not a good idea, so Jack stuck to the route suggested by the concierge. London’s streets were laid out long before surveyors with precision instruments platted the emerging cities of the New World into grid systems. Jack soon learned that it was not unusual for London streets to change names three times in the space of three blocks.

How the heck is Vince getting around here?

He stopped at the corner to check his map, but the one he’d picked up from the hotel was essentially a walking tour of World War II memorials. The East End was especially hard hit by Hitler’s air raids, partly because of its proximity to the docks, partly because the attack on its heavily Jewish population fit nicely with the Nazi agenda. The dates on the memorial plaques along the route-the bombing of the Great Synagogue, Duke’s Place, May 1942; the Bethnal Green Tube Station disaster, March 1943-were right around the time period that Jack’s grandfather had been talking about. It got Jack to thinking about Grandpa and General Swyteck. Petrak. Whoever. Maybe he could stop by the Czech Centre in the morning and straighten it out: Excuse me, my eighty-seven-year-old grandfather, who talks to a dead pope and who suddenly thinks our family is Jewish, says we’re related to an ex-pat Czech general from World War II. Can you help me? Oh, and did I mention he has Alzheimer’s?

“Come with me!”

Jack resisted the strange woman pulling on his arm, and when she tugged harder, he swung in self-defense, forcing her to duck out of the way.

“It’s me, Shada Mays!”

Jack froze, but her grip tightened around his forearm as she led him into the pub at the corner. They settled into the darkest booth available, where Jack stared at her from across the table, too stunned to talk. She seemed out of breath, and for a moment Jack wondered if Shada had been running one continuous marathon since they’d bumped into each other outside the Carpenter’s Arms.

“Where’s Vince?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Tell me what’s going on.”

She glanced nervously over her shoulder, and in the dim glow of a neon sign in the window, Jack noticed the abrasions and swelling on the side of her face.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“I thought he was going to kill me.”

“Vince?”

“No. This guy who… it’s a long story.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“No, I’m fine. Just a little sore.”

“Tell me who did this to you.”

“His name’s Habib. He fooled me for a long time, but I’m starting to think he killed my daughter.”

Jack was speechless for a second. “Okay, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Even the short version took several minutes. She covered everything from her infidelity before McKenna’s death to the recent blows that marked her face. Jack leaned close as he listened, arms resting atop the table, trying to absorb the enormity of what she was saying.

“When I ran from you today,” she continued, “I went over to his flat. After we were together, Habib went out, but he wouldn’t tell me where he was going. I had a bad vibe, like something was about to snap. Sure enough, he came back a couple hours later looking like he’d been fighting. He started shouting, accusing me of double-crossing him and setting him up. Crazy stuff about how I’d blown six months of work.”

“What kind of work?”

“I have no idea.”

Jack retrieved his cell phone from his coat.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“I agreed to keep the police out of this until Vince and I were able to talk to you. Now I’m hearing that the man who beat you up may also have killed your daughter, but clearly you’re not telling me everything. So I’m calling the police.”

She grabbed his phone. “I’m not ready to go to the police.”

“You mean Chuck’s not ready to go to the police.”

Her mouth fell open, and the reaction confirmed Jack’s suspicion: Coordination of some sort was stretching across the ocean. “What kind of weird thing do you and Chuck have going on?”

Again, she had no answer. Jack snatched his phone back from her. Lawyer’s instinct told him to make the phone call and turn this over to the police-to let Scotland Yard find McKenna’s killer, perhaps Neil’s killer, too. But tonight might be his only chance to find out what Shada knew. Neil would have run with an opportunity like this-and that was a good enough barometer for Jack.

“He’s tracking me, isn’t he? Chuck has GPS spyware tied to my cell phone, and that’s how you found me on the street.”

“Well… that may be.”