F. Paul Wilson - Haunted Air

"Okay, then... what else have these mysterious bad guys hit you with?"

"Tried to spook us out this morning by playing games with the doors and windows, then they wrecked the Channeling Room."

"That's why the windows are draped outside?"

Lyle nodded. "They're trying to scare off my clients."

"Clients?" Here was a chance to see if he could get a rise out of Ifasen. "That's probably how they think of themselves. But let's call them what you call them: sitters... marks... fish." As Lyle stared at him, Jack smiled and shrugged. "I used to be in the game."

"Game?" Lyle said, his expression going stony. "This is no game. This is my life."

"And your livelihood-a good one, most likely. But you probably already knew I was onto you. I figure you saw me notch my billet last night."

No reaction. The Kenton brothers might as well have been statues.

Time to push a little harder.

"By the way, which one of you sneaked into Junie Moon's apartment and hid her bracelet?" Jack pointed to the younger brother. "I'm betting it was Charlie here. Am I right?"

Charlie's gaze flicked to his brother and back, telling Jack he'd scored a bull's-eye.

"You're accusing us of a crime," Lyle said. His lips had thinned, eyes had narrowed to slits.

"One I've committed myself. The medium I worked for used to send me on errands like that." It was SOP: rifle the sitter's purse while the lights are out, cut a duplicate house key, then pay a visit when nobody's home. "When it works, it's a beaut, isn't it."

"I wouldn't know," Lyle said, still not giving an inch.

Jack tried again. He stepped back and checked out the overhead light fixture.

"That where you stashed the bug? Lady I worked for bugged her waiting room and listened to the sitters as they hung out. Pulled all sorts of inside info from their chatter."

The brothers went into statue mode again.

"Look, guys," Jack said, "if we're going to be working together, we've got to be straight with each other."

"We're not working together yet."

"Fair enough. How about I take a look at what they did to your Channeling Room?"

Lyle stared at him, obviously wary.

"Maybe this is a bad idea," Jack said, only partially faking annoyance as he turned toward the door. "You've already wasted some of my time. Don't see much point in letting you waste more."

"Wait," Lyle said. He hesitated again, then sighed. "Okay, but nothing you see here goes past these walls, agreed?"

"Consider me a priest. With Alzheimer's."

This pulled a grin from Charlie, which he hid behind a cough. Even Lyle's lips twisted a little.

"All right." He moved toward the door to the Channeling Room. "Take a look."

Jack stepped through ahead of the brothers and strode to the middle of the room. He could see that some of the statues had been damaged, and spotted a couple of gaps where mirrors had hung, but on the whole the room didn't look so bad.

"You have to understand that we spent the whole afternoon cleaning up," Lyle said. "Every piece of glass in this room was shattered."

"A bazillion pieces," Charlie said.

"How? Shotgun?"

Lyle shook his head. "We haven't figured that out yet."

"Mind if I take a look around?"

"Be our guest. You get any ideas, we'd love to hear them."

Jack wandered to the oak seance table. He bent and examined the thick legs and paw feet.

"That area fine," Charlie said. "You wanna check out the windows and mirrors that-"

"I'll get to them."

He found the levers in one of the legs. He seated himself and worked them with his feet, tilting the table this way and that. He nodded his appreciation.

"Smooth."

He checked the chairs and found the tip of a steel rod in one leg of each.

"How's this work? A little motor in the seat that pushes the rod down, right? Activate it with a remote and it tilts the sitter's chair. Sweet. You guys design this stuff yourself?"

Charlie glanced at Lyle, who sighed again. "Charlie's the mechanical guru."

Well, well, well, Jack thought. They've finally opened up. Let's hope it's smoother going from here on in.

"How do you handle vibrations from the motor?" he asked Charlie.

"Padding," he said. "Loads of it."

"Nice work," he said, giving him a sincere thumbs up. "Very nice."

Charlie's grin told Jack he'd made a friend.

He moved to the windows, pulled the drapes aside. Every pane was broken, blown into the room, not out. But the old-fashioned wooden mullions that had held them in place remained untouched.

He went from one window to the next; whether facing front, side or rear, the story was the same.

How the hell...?

He turned to the brothers and shrugged. "I've got no answer for you."

"You can't help us?" Charlie said.

"Didn't say that. Can't tell you how this was done, but I can help see it doesn't happen again."

"How?" Lyle said.

"Keep an eye on the place. I'm a one-man operation. I'll put in some personal watch time outside when I can, and set up some motion-triggered cameras for when I can't."

"Why not motion-triggered alarms?" Charlie said.

Lyle grunted. "How about motion-triggered machine guns?"

"Scaring them off isn't as important as finding out who they are. Once we know that, I track them down, and then you tell them to lay off."

"Oh, that'll work," Charlie said with a derisive snort. "Suppose they don't wanna lay off?"

"Then I convince them."

"How?" Lyle asked.

"That's my department. That's why you'll be paying me the big bucks. I can make life miserable for them. When I'm through they'll wish they'd never messed with, or even heard of the Kenton brothers."

Charlie grinned. "I'm down with that."

Lyle frowned, then turned to Jack. "Let's talk about these 'big bucks' you mentioned."

8

After they'd adjourned to the kitchen, where Lyle and Jack drank beers and Charlie sipped a Pepsi, Lyle tried to angle for a low-ball price, pleading financial straits after the major renovations to the old place, and now the repairs they'd need. Jack wasn't buying, but he did allow for three payments instead of the usual two: he'd take half down, a quarter when he identified the culprits, and the final quarter when he got them to stop.

Lyle still held out, saying he and Charlie would have to discuss it, go over the books, blah-blah-blah before making a final decision. But Jack sensed the decision had been made. He was on.

Damn, it felt good to be working again.

"Let's talk about possible bad guys," Jack said as Lyle handed him a fresh Heineken. "Could anyone local be behind this?"

Lyle shook his head. "There's an old gypsy on Steinway who reads palms and such, and that's about it. Astoria's got a lot of Muslims, you know, and if you believe in Islam, you can't believe in spiritualism."

Jack was thinking things must have been pretty tense around here after the World Trade disaster, but all that had gone down before the Kentons' arrival.

Which brought Jack to a question that had been niggling him since last night. "Then why Astoria?"

"Manhattan's too expensive. All the real estate agents told me rents had dropped after the Trade Center attack, but even so, they were still too high for the amount of space we need."

"For your eventual church."

From Charlie's uneasy expression and the way he started fingering his wwjd pin, Jack figured he'd hit a sore spot.

"When do you figure you'll get yours going?"

"Never, I hope," Charlie said, glaring at Lyle. "Because that's the day I walk out."

"Let's not get into that now, okay?"

Jack tried to break the sudden tension by gesturing at this house around them. "So you went out and found this place in the wilds of Queens."

"Yes. I wanted it because of its history. And because of its history, the price was right."