The Storm King(81)
“?‘Months’? It took me five minutes to find his secret stash of research, and that included breaking the pass code to the door it was locked behind.”
“What, you want a round of applause?”
“Everything you know came from these?” Nate held up the sheath of paper.
“That packet’s a copy of her last notebook. His notes said the rest were in her room, but the chief found that one right here. Read the last entry.”
Lucy’s script was larger in the packet’s last pages. It listed with a drunken slant unbound by the ruled lines.
Sometimes I don’t know if I can do it anymore and be everything he wants me to be all the time.
“Out loud.”
Nate almost lunged for the boy then. He was no one’s performing monkey and never had been. James was younger, but Nate had always been fast. Catch James, and he’d find out everything the vandals knew. Catch James, and the game was over.
“Why are you smiling?” James asked.
A note of fear crept into the boy’s voice. For now, this was enough to sate the beast inside Nate. When he read the entry aloud it was an act of magnanimity and not of submission.
So am I using him, or is he using me? Is that what love is—two people using each other?…
I could leave Nate, and no one would care because in the normal world this happens all the time. No one would skewer me with dirty looks from across the street or tell the twins what a legendary bitch their sister is. I think I could be kind if I wanted to be. I think I could be just about anything if I could just be free….
He didn’t let his voice falter, though it wanted to.
Nate didn’t look at me while he hacked away at Adam, but he did when he was finished. And Christ, his face. That way he smiles like a wolf. All teeth. I’ve seen that look before, but he’s never used it on me. Not ever. It’s different when those ice-cold eyes are on you. So I ran. Because I know Nate isn’t really there when he’s like this. He’s something else, and whatever that thing is, it scares me. I think it scares everyone….
The last words made him shiver.
Someone’s coming.
Now that he finally knew what had happened to Lucy, they were pure horror.
Someone’s coming.
“I told you. We know everything,” James said. If looks could kill, the boy’s snarl alone would have been dismembering.
“Everything. Right. Except for the one thing that actually matters.” Nate tossed the packet back onto the bar with the others. He dialed up the disgust. He had to, because despair was the only other option. “So what’s the plan? You terrorize everyone whose name shows up in Lucy’s journals and…what?”
“One of you killed her.”
“Maybe. And?”
“And?” James spat out. Rage made his face ugly. “And you have to be punished!”
Nate wanted James to have a plan. He’d hoped that it was some masterful conspiracy hatched after fourteen years of plotting that had landed Grams an inch from death.
But James was no Storm King.
For the first time since Lucy’s remains had been discovered, Nate contemplated a future in which he never found out who’d murdered her. James was right that the players she’d written about in her journals were the most likely suspects, but it could have been someone else. A total stranger. You only had to pick up a newspaper to know that in a universe that stacked chance upon chance, death could find you anywhere.
James still stared at him. Had he said something? Nate wondered. He saw the ivory-knuckled fury in the boy’s fists and felt the furnace of his gaze. Lucy, Maura Jeffers, Grams, Pete Corso: The equations of pain were grotesquely out of balance. Of course James was angry.
Nate detected movement behind him, to both his left and right. Shadows skulked toward him across the scuffed floor. Medea and the gnashing of the furious lake must have covered their footsteps as they crept up from the undercroft or down from the Century Room.
Nate took a step back. The short kid built like a fireplug, the goth girl, the pale towheaded boy. This was the strange tribe from Lucy’s funeral. As they neared the lantern’s aura, Nate saw baseball bats, wooden planks, and pikes of rebar clutched in their young hands. In the blood-tinged light, the vandals’ faces looked like slabs of meat in an abattoir.
“Not too close.” James waved the others away as if Nate were a rabid beast. “Not till I say.”
Nate reconsidered the young man. He did have a plan.
“What’d you do to Pete?” James asked again.
“I told you—”
“They were supposed to tag your house last night. Now Maura’s dead and Pete’s missing. We cruised Bonaparte Street this morning and what’d we see, Carlos?”
The stout boy took one cautious step into the perimeter of red light. He held the rebar toward Nate like an exorcist brandishing a cross. “Nothing?”
“That’s right. Nothing. They never tagged your house, which means they never got by you. Which means you did something to them.”
The goth girl took a step closer, the scarlet glow of the lantern lighting the moon of her face like a Christmas ornament. The plank she carried was spiked with nails.
They were psyching themselves up to do something. Something Nate was certain to find unpleasant. They had the numbers and the weapons. At the moment it was only courage that they lacked, and James buttressed this with each word.