John Miller - Death Draws Five

Jerry had been there a couple of times when they were getting the camp up and running. It was a favorite charity funded to a large degree by him and Ackroyd, and administered by Father Squid and a committee drawn mainly from his parish. Located on a couple of dozen acres set in the middle of nowhere which were owned by a friend of the joker priest, Camp Xavier Desmond was a year round retreat whose purpose was to get poor joker and nat kids out of the city so they could hang out together and learn about each other. It was open all summer and on weekends when school was in session, just to give kids a breath of fresh air, to show them what a tree looked like and maybe help them realize that nats and jokers weren’t so different after all.

Once they’d crossed over the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Jerry avoided the Palisades Parkway feeder road, sticking to the thoroughfare leading to old Route 17. He could have taken the 87, also known as the Thruway, which was wider, straighter, and faster. But he didn’t want wide, straight, and fast. He wanted narrow, crooked, and obscure, and old 17 was that in spades.

The little traffic there was on 17 consisted of commuters heading south to New York City. Virtually nobody was traveling on his side of the road. He kept to the speed limit and drove conservatively, glancing every now and then at John Fortune, who had conked out in the front seat next to him well before they’d crossed the Hudson. The boy had been through a lot, and this was probably the first time he’d felt safe enough to get a good rest. Jerry himself was going on the last dregs of adrenaline his body had left. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept, and food was nearly a forgotten concept. He could have stopped at one of the diners that catered to travelers on the old road, but he had no wallet, no I.D., no money. Doggedly, he drove on.

Wanting real obscurity, he turned west on 17A as soon as possible, entering the empty big space on the road map. As always, he found it kind of hard to believe that there was so much nothing so close to New York City. A confirmed city boy, the nearness of so much unused land always bothered him. More than once he found himself thinking that what these open fields needed was a couple of good apartment complexes to fill them up, but intellectually he realized that these open space were not really wasted. The rich soil was burgeoning with crops of all kinds—corn, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, celery, and other vegetables that would eventually make themselves useful at one salad bar or another. He was just not used to seeing them in the wild.

It was slow going, and even slower once he’d reached the sleepy hamlet of Florida with its one traffic light. He turned from 17A to the network of county roads that spread through the rural landscape like capillaries meandering off larger blood vessels. The traffic was now at a minimum, mainly locals headed for their jobs at metropolises like Middletown and Goshen, places whose populations didn’t exceed that of a decent-sized apartment complex.

Half relieved to find the place again, he pulled into Camp Xavier Desmond just as it was waking up to face another beautiful summer day. He was still wearing Butcher Dagon’s face and body, not thinking it prudent to take the time to transform in the middle of their escape, but was still easily able to establish his bona fides with the camp superintendent while keeping John under wraps in the car. It was before office hours at Ackroyd and Creighton, but he called to check in and leave a message, saying where they were and that they were all right. He got the kid settled into an empty guest cabin, had a big, satisfying breakfast, and went to the cabin himself and crashed.

He slept well and deeply, knowing that he’d earned every moment of the rest he took.

Las Vegas: Airport

They had to rush through breakfast to catch their early morning flight. The Angel wasn’t happy about that. All she wanted was to get her money’s worth (Well, she reminded herself, The Hand’s money’s worth.), but there was also the fact that they were going to be on the plane for a good part of the day and plane food was notoriously bad. And scanty.

Breakfast unfortunately turned out to be the high point of the day, which went downhill really fast.

The Angel and Ray boarded the plane half an hour before take-off. The flight was already full. Ray grumbled endlessly about the fact that they’d gotten stuck in the main cabin because they’d had to buy their tickets at the last second. He was, the Angel thought, acting like a spoiled child. Their seats were perfectly adequate.

They had two seats in a row in the cabin’s central section. Ray offered her the aisle seat, but she declined. That was her first mistake. Her second was being nice to the man who sat down next to her, smiling at him when he first plopped down. He was young, rather handsome with lean, dark good looks. Almost Mediterranean, with thick, wavy hair and dark, puppy-dog eyes. She was somewhat suspicious of him at first, but she told herself not to stereotype. Not every Italian-looking man was an Allumbrado.

She had her first qualm when she smelled the liquor wafting off him in waves, the smell of which was undisguised by his rather potent hair tonic, skin lotion, and cologne. It was an uneasy combination of odors to experience so early in the morning and it didn’t help any when their take-off was delayed for unspecified reasons and the air-conditioning was turned off as they sat on the runway and waited. And waited. And waited.

The passenger sitting next to the Angel wanted to while away the time drinking, but the flight attendant refused him alcohol. He then turned his attention to the Angel and she finally realized that he was hitting on her when she felt his hand on her upper thigh.

“Take your hand off me,” she said in a cold voice.

He only smiled back at her. Ray, who had been focused in on his own little world, turned his head and frowned as she spoke. “You want to take it down a notch, Jack?” he asked.

“Please, Billy—” the Angel began, but the drunk interrupted her.

“I’m not poaching your private preserve, am I?” he asked Ray.

Ray frowned. “No, but—”

“Hey,” the drunk interrupted again, “she’s free, white, and twenty-one, ain’t she?”

Ray’s expression went cold. “How’d you like to be drunk, dead, and thirty-five, dork?”

“Billy!”

“You threatening me?” the drunk asked belligerently.

Ray laughed in his face. The drunk turned red, stood, and drew his fist back. The Angel caught it in her palm as he tried to punch Ray.

“Stop it!” she ordered.

The drunk tried to pull free. She twisted his wrist a little harder than she’d intended, and heard something snap. He screamed, “You broke my fucking arm, you fucking bitch!”

Then his face turned puce and he gagged.

“No,” the Angel said. “Oh, no.”

He threw up in her lap.

Ray was out of his seat and standing in the aisle before the spatter could hit him. “Son of a—” he started to say when a swarm of flight attendants descended on them. Some of them tried to placate Ray, some tried to help the Angel and a couple others led the still-retching drunk away.

“I saw it all,” one of the stewardesses said. “It wasn’t your fault. Not at all. But I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the plane so we can clean... this... all... up.”

The Angel saw Ray muttering to himself, barely under control.

“My name is Billy Ray. I’m with the Secret Service. This is my associate. We have to get to New York as soon as possible—”

”I sympathize,” the stewardess said. “But surely you can’t expect to travel in this condition.”