F. Paul Wilson - Hosts

"Corn? You brought me an ear of corn? I'm at a loss for words, Vicks. No one's ever, ever given me a gift like this."

"Mom thought of it. She said to give it to you next time you told one of your jokes."

"Oh, she did, did she?"

He glanced at Gia who was staring straight ahead, wind fingers from the open window running through her short blond hair as a barely perceptible smile played about her lips.

Jack had been teaching Vicky to tell jokes. One of the many wonderful things about an eight-year-old was that even the hoariest, lamest one-liners got a laugh. She loved puns, and a joke the caliber of What's the difference between a fish and a piano? You can't tuna fish ! was the absolute funniest thing she'd ever heard. Trouble was, Vicky practiced her act on her mother who had to listen to the same joke again and again and be expected to laugh every time.

"I think this calls for a new knock-knock, Vicks," Jack said. He had a really bad one he hadn't told her yet.

Gia groaned softly. "No. Please, God, no."

"Knock-knock," Jack said.

Vicky replied, "Who's there?"

"Banana."

"Banana who?"

"Knock-knock."

"Who's there?" she repeated with a giggle.

"Banana."

"Banana who?"

"Knock-knock."

Vicky was laughing now. "Who's there?"

"Banana."

"Not again! Banana who ?"

"Knock-knock."

"Who's there?"" She made "there" a two-syllable word this time.

"Orange."

"Orange who?"

"Orange you glad I didn't say banana again?"

Vicky dissolved into belly laughs. A child laughing—Jack couldn't think of a more wonderful sound. She went on so long that he began laughing himself. Only Gia seemed to miss the humor. She'd closed her eyes and thrown her head back against the headrest.

"The only good thing about knock-knocks," she said in a low voice, "the only thing, is that they're short. But now you've gone and taught her one that's triple length. Thank you, my love."

Jack pressed the ear of corn against the side of his head. "What's that? Your voice sounds husky. I can't ear you."

Vicky burst into another laugh so loud and hard that even Gia had to smile—though she hid it behind her hand.

"I got a million of 'em, Vicks. Want to hear another?"

"Let's talk about your sister instead," Gia said quickly. "How on earth did she find you?"

Jack took a moment to allow himself to switch gears. "It's complicated but in the end it comes down to this: this friend she's babysitting after brain tumor therapy has been acting weird and got herself involved with some sort of cult. A stranger gave her my number."

Gia frowned. "A stranger just happens to give your sister your number. Do you buy that?"

"I know it's one hell of a coincidence, but it happened. What else could it be? I know 1 was the last person on earth Kate was expecting to meet. You should have seen the look on her lace when she saw me. Looked like she'd been poleaxed."

"Still," Gia said, shaking her head. "Very strange. What does she look like?"

"Not too much like me. She takes after my father's side. But you can see her in person tonight if you want. She called this morning and invited us over for dinner."

"Us?"

"Yeah, well, I told her about you. Are you up for it?"

"Are you kidding? Pass up an opportunity to get first-hand dirt about you when you were in knickers?"

"I never wore knickers."

"I wouldn't miss it for the world!"

"Swell."

He spotted an Exxon sign and pulled off. Called Julio and heard what he had to say. When he returned to the car he must have looked as ill as he felt.

Gia took one look at him and said, "What's wrong?"

Time to tell her. "We had an incident on one of the subways while you were gone," he said, trying to be oblique.

"The bang-bangs," Gia said, catching on that he wanted to keep Little Miss Big Ears in the back seat out of the loop. With practice they'd managed to raise vagueness to an art. "That made the news even in Ottumwa."

"Then you've heard about the man they're looking for."

"The one they're calling the Savior?"

Jack looked at her and nodded. "Uh-huh."

Gia met his eyes, then she paled and jammed her hand against her mouth. "Oh, God, Jack, no!"

"What is it?" Vicky said from the rear. "What happened?"

"A car came too close, honey," Gia said.

"Oh." She went back to her Harry Potter book.

Gia stared at him. "I heard about it on the news. I worried about you, if you were one of the victims, but that lasted only an instant because then they were talking about someone who'd stopped the, um"—her eyes flashed toward the rear seat—"carnage and then taken off, and the first person I thought of was you, because you wouldn't let something like that happen, and you certainly wouldn't hang around afterward." She took a breath. "But I never really believed it was you. It must have been awful!"

"It was. But it's getting worse. Julio says someone was flashing what looks like a police artist's sketch of me around his place this morning. And from Julio's description it sounds like this kid from The Light who was sitting near me when it went down."

" The LightV Gia made a face. "What are you going to do?"

"Not sure yet. But I've got to do something."

Jack drove on with a cold weight in his stomach. Couldn't let this kid go on flashing his picture around the Upper West Side. Sooner or later—sooner, Jack bet—someone would recognize the kid as the eyewitness reporter from The Light and two and two would add up to him.

5

The good thing about the lower end of Riverside Park, Sandy had decided, was that it was narrow enough to allow him to see from one side to the other. Luxury midrise apartment houses climbed to the east, and the Hudson sparkled in the late morning sun to the west beyond the trees and the highway. The bad part was that the man he was looking for was nowhere to be seen.

He'd wandered from the Eleanor Roosevelt statue all the way to the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and back. The mild weather was drawing more and more people outdoors. He checked out the basketball courts, the sunbathers, the readers, the snoozers, the frisbee tossers, the dog walkers, even the baby carriage pushers, showing his printout to anyone he could collar.

No luck. Zero. Zilch.

A beautiful day but he wasn't in the mood to appreciate it as he stood near the bronze statue of a very young-looking Eleanor and wondered, Have I been had?

Could this Julio guy have sent him on this wild goose chase just to get rid of him so he could start his own search?

Sandy looked around, trying to decide whether to leave or hang in a little longer. He'd shown the printout to everyone in sight…

… except the man on the bench downslope from where he stood. When had he arrived? He slouched on the seat, chin on chest with his arms folded and a baseball cap pulled low over his face, catching forty winks.

Sandy walked toward him. He felt a brief flutter of apprehension about disturbing a sleeping man but he was determined to leave no stone unturned.

"Excuse me, sir," he said as he reached him. "Can I ask you a question?"

What happened next was a blur: the man did not look up but his hand darted out to grab the collar of Sandy's T-shirt, twisting it tight about his throat as he yanked him nearly off his feet to land in a half sprawl next to him on the bench.

Now the head turned and Sandy knew this face, the face he'd been showing people for two days, but he didn't know the eyes because the mild brown seemed so much darker now and so full of fury. He opened his mouth to cry out but the index finger of the man's free hand was in his face, an inch from his left eye, and he was talking through his teeth.