John Connolly - The Lovers

“Again: why?”

“I don’t know, except that you are a threat to them, and you have always been a threat. Perhaps even they do not know for certain the nature of the threat that you pose, but they sense it and they react to it, and their purpose is to extinguish it. They were trying to kill you, Mr. Parker, and they probably believed that they had succeeded, for a time, until they found out that they were wrong, and you had been hidden from them, so they were forced to return and rectify their mistake.”

“And failed a second time.”

“And failed,” echoed Epstein. “But in the years since then you have begun to draw attention to yourself. You have encountered men and women who share something of their nature, if not their purpose, and it may be that whoever, or whatever, dispatched these things has begun to notice you. It’s not hard to draw the necessary conclusion, which is-”

“That they’ll return to try again,” I finished.

“Not ‘will return,’” said Epstein. “They have returned.”

And from beneath the description of the wasp and its actions he withdrew a photograph. It showed the kitchen at Hobart Street, and the symbol that had been painted in blood upon its wall.

“This is also the mark that was found on the body of Peter Ackerman, and on the boy, Dryden, killed by your father at Pearl River,” he said.

Then he added more photographs. “This is the mark that was found on the bodies of Missy Gaines and your birth mother’s killer. It has since R aIt has si been found at three more crime scenes, one of them old, two of them recent.”

“How recent?”

“Weeks.”

“But unconnected to me.”

“Yes, it would appear so.”

“What are they doing?”

“Leaving signs. For each other and, perhaps, in the case of Hobart Street, for you.”

He smiled, and there was pity in that smile.

“You see, something has returned, and it wants you to know it.”

For the dead travel fast. -BRAM STOKER (1847-1912), DRACULA (AFTER BURGER’S “LENORE”)

T HE DRUNKS WERE OUTin force. A hockey game had been played that night, and the bar was a magnet for fans because one of the owners, Ken Harbaruk, had enjoyed brief spells with both the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Bruins before a motorcycle accident put an end to his career. He used to say that it was the best thing that could have happened to him, under the circumstances. He was good, but he wasn’t good enough. Eventually, he knew, he would have found himself in the minors, playing for nickels and trying to pick up women who were easily impressed in bars a lot like the one he now owned. Instead, he’d been compensated well for his injuries, and had plowed the money into a half share in a bar that seemed destined to guarantee him the kind of comfortable retirement that would have been denied him had he been able to continue playing. In addition, had he wished, he could still have picked up women who were easily impressed, or so he told himself, but more usually he found himself thinking about his quiet apartment and his soft bed as the long nights in the bar drew to a close. He had a comfortable yet casual relationship with a lawyer who was a well-preserved fifty-one. They each had homes of their own, and they alternated overnight stays from weekend to weekend, although he sometimes wished for something a little more defined. Secretly, he would have liked for her to move in with him, but he knew that wasn’t what she wanted. She valued her independence. At first, he thought that she was keeping him at a remove in order to ascertain how serious he was about her. Now, after three years, he realized he was being kept at a distance because that was exactly how she wanted it, and if he desired something more then he would have to look elsewhere. He figured he was too old to look elsewhere, and he should be thankful for what he had. He was, he felt, reasonably lucky, and reasonably content.

Yet, on nights like this, when the Bruins were playing and the bar was filled with men and women who were too young to remember her or him, or old enough to recall how inconsequential his career had been, Harbaruk experienced a nagging sense of regret at the path his life had taken, which he hid by being even louder and more boisterous than usual.

“But them’s the breaks,” he had told Emily Kindler after he’d interviewed her for the waitress job. In fact, she’d hardly been required to say a word. All she had to do was listen and nod occasionally as he retold the story of his life, altering her expression as required to look sympathetic, interested, angry, or happy, according to the dictates of the plot. She believed that she knew his type: genial; smarter than he appeared to be, but with no illusions about his intelligence; the kind of guy who might fantasize about making a pass at her but would never act on it, and would feel guilty for even thinking such a thing. He told her about the lawyer, and mentioned the fact that he had been married way back, but it hadn’t worked out. If he was surprised by how much he was willing to share with her, then she was not. She had found that men wanted to tell her things. They exposed their inner selves to her, and she did not know why.

“Never was able to talk much to women,” Harbaruk told her as the interview drew to a close. “Might not seem that way now, but it’s true.”

The girl was unusual, he thought. She looked like she could do with a little fattening up, and her arms were so thin that he was pretty sure he could entirely encircle the widest point of her biceps with one meaty hand, but she was undeniably pretty, and what he had first taken for fragility, to the extent that he had almost dismissed the possibility of hiring her as soon as he set eyes on her, was revealing itself to be something more complex and ineffable. There was strength there. Maybe not physical, although he was starting to believe that she was not as weak as she looked, because one thing Ken Harbaruk had always been good at was judging the strength of an opponent, but an inner steeliness. Harbaruk sensed that the girl had been through some hard times, but they hadn’t broken her.

“Well, you talked okay to me,” she said.

She smiled. She wanted the job.

Harbaruk shook his head, knowing that he was being played, but he still found that he was blushing slightly. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks.

“It’s nice of you to say,” he replied. “It’s just a shame that everything in life can’t be handled with an interview over a soda.”

He stood, and extended his hand. She took it, and they shook.

“You seem like a good kid. Talk to Shelley over there. She’s the bar manager. She’ll fix you up with some shifts and we’ll see how you get along.”

She thanked him, and that was how she came to be waitressing in KEN HARBARUK’S SPORTS BAR AND RESTAURANT-LOCAL HOME OF THE NHL, as the sign above the door announced in big black-on-white letters. Beside it, a neon hockey player shot a puck then raised his hands in the air in triumph. The hockey player was dressed in red and white, a nod to Ken’s Polish ancestry. He was always being asked if he was related to Nick Harbaruk, who had enjoyed a career spanning sixteen years, from 1961 to 1977, including four seasons with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1970s. He wasn’t, but it didn’t bother him to be asked. He was proud of his fellow Poles who had succeeded on the ice: Nick, Pete Stemkowsk Z ate Stemkoi, John Miszuk, Eddie Leier among the old-timers, and Czerkawski, Oliwa, and Sidorkiewicz among the new boys. There were photographs of them on the wall below one of the TVs, part of a little shrine dedicated to Poland.