19

Who am I kidding? Jack thought. He had been trudging up and down every West Side street in the area for hours now. His back was aching from walking hunched over. If the mugger had stayed in the neighborhood, Jack would have passed him by now.

But it wasn’t only the futility of tonight’s quest that was getting to him. The afternoon had hit him hard.

Jack prided himself on being a man of few illusions. He believed there was a balance to life and he based that belief on Jack’s Law of Social Dynamics: For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction wasn’t necessarily automatic or inevitable; life wasn’t like thermodynamics. Sometimes the reaction had to be helped along. That was where Repairman Jack came into the picture. He was in the business of making some of those reactions happen. He liked to think of himself as a sort of catalyst.

Jack knew he was a violent man. He made no excuses for that. He had come to terms with it. He had hoped Gia could eventually come to understand it.

When Gia had left him he’d convinced himself that it was all a big misunderstanding, that all he needed was a chance to talk to her and everything would be straightened out, that it was just her Italian pig-headedness keeping them apart. Well, he had had his chance this afternoon and it was obvious there was no hope of a common ground with Gia. She wanted no part of him.

He frightened her.

That was the hardest part to accept. He had scared her off. Not by wronging her or betraying her, but simply by letting her know the truth… by letting her know what Repairman Jack fixed, and how he went about his work, and what tools he used.

One of them was wrong. Until this afternoon it had been easy to believe that it was Gia. Not so easy tonight. He believed in Gia, believed in her sensitivity, her perceptiveness. And she found him repugnant.

A soul-numbing lethargy seeped through him.

What if she’s right? What if I am nothing more than a high-priced hoodlum who’s rationalized his way into believing he’s one of the good guys?

Jack shook himself. Self-doubt was a stranger to him. He wasn’t sure how to fight back. And he had to fight it. He wouldn’t change the way he lived; doubted he could if he wanted to. He had spent too long on the outside to find his way back in again—

Something about the guy sitting in the doorway he had just passed… something about that face in the shadows that his unconscious had spotted in passing but had not yet sent up to his forebrain. Something…

Jack let go of the shopping basket handle. It clattered to the sidewalk. As he bent to pick it up, he glanced back at the doorway.

The guy was young with short blond hair—and had a white gauze patch over his left eye. Jack felt his heart increase its tempo. This was almost too good to be true. Yet there he was, keeping back in the shadows, doubtlessly well-aware that his patch marked him. It had to be him. If not, it was one hell of a coincidence. Jack had to be sure.

He picked up the cart and stood still for a moment, deciding his next move. Patch had noticed him, but seemed indifferent. Jack would have to change that.

With a cry of delight, he bent and pretended to pick something out from under the wheel of the cart. As he straightened, he turned his back to the street—but remained in full view of Patch, whom he pretended not to see—and dug inside the top of his dress. He removed the roll of bills, made sure Patch got a good look at its thickness, then pretended to wrap a new bill around it. He stuffed it back in his ersatz bra, and continued on his way.

About a hundred feet on, he stopped to adjust a shoe and took advantage of the moment to sneak a look behind: Patch was out of the shadows and following him down the street.

Good. Now to arrange a rendezvous.

He removed the sap from the paper bag and slipped his wrist through the thong, then went on until he came to an alley. Without an apparent care in the world, he turned into it and let the darkness swallow him.

Jack had moved maybe two dozen feet down the littered path when he heard the sound he knew would come: quick, stealthy footsteps approaching from the rear. When the sound was almost upon him, he lurched to the left and flattened his back against the wall. A dark form hurtled by and fell sprawling over the cart.

Amid the clatter of metal and muttered curses, the figure scrambled to its feet and faced him. Jack felt truly alive now, reveling in the pulses of excitement crackling like bolts of lightning through his nervous system, anticipating one of the fringe benefits of his work—giving a punk like this a taste of his own medicine.

Patch seemed hesitant. Unless he was very stupid, he must have realized that his prey had moved a bit too fast for an old lady. Jack did not want to spook him, so he made no move. He simply crouched against the alley wall and let out a high-pitched howl that would have put Una O’Connor to shame.

Patch jumped and glanced up and down the alley.

“Hey! Shut up!”

Jack screamed again.

“Shut the fuck up!”

But Jack only crouched lower, gripped the handle of the sap tighter, and screamed once more.

“Awright, bitch!” Patch said through his teeth as he charged forward. “You asked for it.” There was anticipation in his voice. Jack could tell he liked beating up people who couldn’t fight back. As Patch loomed over him with raised fists, Jack straightened to his full height, bringing his left hand up from the floor. He caught Patch across the face with a hard, stinging, open-palmed slap that rocked him back on his heels.

Jack knew what would follow, so he was moving to his right even as he swung. Sure enough, as soon as Patch regained his balance, he started for the street. He had just made a big mistake and he knew it. Probably thought he had picked an undercover cop to roll. As he darted by on his way to freedom, Jack stepped in and swung the sap at Patch’s skull. Not a hard swing—a flick of the wrist, really—but it connected with a satisfying thunk. Patch’s body went slack, but not before his reflexes had jerked him away from Jack. His momentum carried him head first into the far wall. He settled to the floor of the alley with a sigh.

Jack shucked off the wig and dress and got back into his sneakers, then he went over and nudged Patch with his foot. He groaned and rolled over. He appeared dazed, so Jack reached out with his free hand and shook him by the shoulder. Without warning, Patch’s right arm whipped around, slashing at Jack with the four-inch blade protruding from his fist. Jack grabbed the wrist with one hand and poked at a spot behind Patch’s left ear, just below the mastoid. Patch grunted with pain; as Jack applied more and more pressure, he began flopping around like a fish on a hook. Finally he dropped the knife. As Jack relaxed his hold, Patch made a leap to retrieve the knife. Jack had half expected this. The sap still hung from his wrist by its thong. He grabbed it and smashed it across the back of Patch’s hand, putting all of his wrist and a good deal of his forearm behind the blow. The crunch of bone was followed by a scream of pain.

“You broke it!” He rolled onto his belly and then back onto his side. “I’ll have your ass for this, pig!” He moaned and whined and swore incoherently, all the while cradling his injured hand.

“Pig?” Jack said in his softest voice. “No such luck, friend. This is personal.”

The moaning stopped. Patch peered through the darkness with his good eye, a worried look on his face. As he placed his good hand against the wall to prop himself up, Jack raised the sap for another blow.

“No fair, man!” He quickly withdrew the hand and lay down again. “No fair!”

“Fair?” Jack laughed as nastily as he could. “Were you going to be fair to the old lady you thought you had trapped here? No rules in this alley, friend. Just you and me. And I’m here to get you.”

He saw Patch’s eye widen; his tone echoed the fear in his face.

“Look, man. I don’t know what’s goin’ down here, but you got the wrong guy. I only came in from Michigan last week.”

“Not interested in last week, friend. Just last night… the old lady you rolled.”

“Hey, I didn’t roll no old lady! No way!” Patch flinched and whimpered as Jack raised the sap menacingly. “I swear to God, man! I swear!”

Jack had to admit the guy was good. Very convincing. “I’ll help your memory a little: Her car broke down; she wore a heavy necklace that looked like silver and had two yellow stones in the middle; and she used her fingernails on your eye.” As he saw comprehension begin to dawn in Patch’s eye, he felt his anger climbing towards the danger point. “She wasn’t in the hospital yesterday, but she is today. And you put her there. She may kick off any time. And if she does, it’s your fault.”

“No, wait, man! Listen—”

He grabbed Patch by the hair at the top of his head and rapped his skull against the brick wall. “You listen! I want the necklace. Where’d you fence it?”

“Fence it? That piece of shit? I threw it away!”

“Where?”

“I don’t know!”

“Remember!” Jack rapped Patch’s head against the wall again for emphasis.

He kept seeing that frail old lady fading into the hospital bed, barely able to speak because of the beating she had received at this creep’s hands. A dark place was opening up inside him. Careful! Control! He needed Patch conscious.

“Alright! Lemme think!”

Jack managed a slow, deep breath. Then another.

“Think. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

It didn’t take that long.

“I thought it was silver. But when I got it under a light I saw it wasn’t.”

“You want me to believe you didn’t even try to get a few bucks for it?”

“I… I didn’t like it.”

Jack hesitated, not sure of how to take that.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t like it, man. Something about it didn’t feel right. I just threw it in some bushes.”

“No bushes around here.”

Patch flinched. “Are too! Two blocks down!”

Jack yanked him to his feet. “Show me.”

Patch was right. Between West End and Twelfth Avenues, where Fifty-eighth Street slopes down toward the Hudson River, was a small clump of privet hedge, the kind Jack had spent many a Saturday morning as a kid trimming in front of his parents’ home in Jersey. With Patch lying face down on the pavement by his feet, Jack reached into the bushes. A little rummaging around among the gum wrappers, used tissues, decaying leaves, and other less easily identifiable refuse produced the necklace.

Jack looked at it as it gleamed dully in the glow from a nearby streetlight. I’ve done it! Goddammit, I’ve done it!

He hefted it in his palm. Heavy. Had to be uncomfortable to wear. Why did Kusum want it back so badly? As he held it in his hand he began to understand what Patch had said to him about it not feeling right. It didn’t feel right. He found it hard to describe the sensation more clearly than that.

Crazy! he thought. This thing’s nothing more than sculpted iron and a couple of topaz-like stones.

Yet he could barely resist the primitive urge to hurl the necklace across the street and run the other way.

“You gonna let me go now?” Patch said, rising to his feet. His left hand was a dusky, mottled blue now, swollen to nearly twice its normal size. He cradled it gingerly against his chest.

Jack held up the necklace. “This is what you beat up an old lady for,” he said in a low voice, feeling the rage pushing toward the surface. “She’s all busted up in a hospital bed now because you wanted to rip this off, and then you threw it away.”

“Look, man!” Patch said, pointing his good hand at Jack. “You’ve got it wrong—”

Jack saw the hand gesturing in the air two feet in front of him and the rage within him suddenly exploded outward. Without warning, he swung the sap hard against Patch’s right hand. As before, there was a crunch and a howl of pain.

As Patch sank to his knees, moaning, Jack walked past him back toward West End Avenue.

“Let’s see you roll an old lady now, tough guy.”

The darkness within him began to retreat. Without looking back, he began walking toward the more populated sections of town. The necklace tingled uncomfortably against the inside of his palm.

He wasn’t far from the hospital. He broke into a run. He wanted to be rid of the necklace as soon as possible.