Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [30]
Outside, Terry saw the usual crush of people—and the man he’d seen wasn’t anywhere nearby. He called up Anne and left a message on her machine that he was with Rick and some others playing pool and maybe she might want to meet up after her mother left and they could grab pizza at Ray’s or something. “Or maybe we can do something after Bio tomorrow. Okay? Call me ASAP babay-babay,” he finished, their little injoke. When he dropped the cell phone in the pocket of his denim painter’s pants, he felt around for cash. He counted up about fourteen bucks in single wadded-up bills, and that’d be enough for a couple of hours of pool and air-hockey, and with a few bucks for the kick-ass jukebox at Fat Cats.
“I’m like four blocks from Fat Cats,” he told Rick via cell phone. “Are you down there?”
“Yep, me and Joe and Debbie. Deb’s kicking my butt in air hockey. Want to say hi?”
“Fuck. Anne’ll cut off my dick if she knows Deb’s there. Shit. And I just told her to come down if she wanted.”
“Maybe she won’t,” Rick said, and then the noise in the background rose as someone was yelling a victory yell and people were laughing. “A lot of cute girls here, dude.”
“Yeah yeah,” Terry said, and as he turned the corner toward Bleecker—to go get some more cigarettes—there was the man again.
As Terry passed by him, the man said, “Terry? You’re Terry West?”
He turned to face the guy, who didn’t look strange or scary, just utterly normal and kind of bland.
“What’s it to you?” Terry asked, and felt he sounded too wimpy.
2
More than an hour later, when Terry awoke, the first thing he did was cough.
Something about his vision was off. He couldn’t quite see. Things were blurry, and he tried to reach up to wipe his eyes clean, but his hands were tied behind his back.
He tugged at them, but they wouldn’t budge.
He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot since the man had been talking to him, talking about his mother, talking about some emergency, and talking to the point where something within Terry had felt a little tired and too confused to understand everything.
His breath returned to him, hot.
It was plastic of some kind over his face.
Tied around his neck—a cord pressed at his throat.
He tried to make out the shadowy figure that stood before him, but the light was too dim, and his own breathing had caused a fog within the plastic.
Soon, the air around his face got warmer, and when he inhaled as deeply as he could, the plastic sucked up against his mouth.
He tried kicking out, but his legs were tied to the chair.
Then, it was as if his lungs burned as he used every ounce of his energy to inhale what little air was left to him.
As he went, as he felt himself sink into unconsciousness, someone—a man’s hands?—grabbed his left arm and held it as if trying to pull him back from the brink of death.
He sucked in as much air as he could, and kept inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.
Chapter Nine
1
Julie arranged a little memorial service in May, just for close family and a few friends.
2
They had no body to bury—it had officially been stolen, according to McGuane, and they suspected the killer himself had some access to the morgue that they’d been trying to pinpoint.
Julie felt for the children’s sake, at least, there needed to be a service. She got Father Joe from Mel’s church, St. Andrew’s, to run through a liturgy just because Mel insisted on something religious, and Hut’s parents had made it for the weekend, and her mother had brought her boyfriend, and even two of Livy’s teachers had shown up.
Hut’s mother and father flew in, and when Julie had a moment alone with Joanne Hutchinson, she asked her about Hut being an orphan ’til he was in his mid-teens.
“Steve wanted a son badly,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it was like for us. We had tried to have children for years. And then when our son died. Our first boy. Before Jeff.” She called him “Jeff,” not the nickname, “Hut,” that Julie had only known him by. Even hearing the word, “Jeff,” sounded like a different person. She could imagine him as a sweet kid. Helpful.