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By Root 3104 0

swing past Frankie’s (where the Italian kid I’d laid out was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen) finally gave me the beginnings of an answer: when Betty’d gotten back from giving me a hand at the Dusters’, she’d found Kat waiting for her. Kat had, it seemed, been feeling very poorly, which was why she’d left off watching the Dusters’ place: a severe pain in her stomach and gut had struck her, a mysterious ailment what neither she nor Betty could identify or ease. On hearing that I was back in town, Kat’d decided to head on up to the Doctor’s house and wait for me, since, as she’d told Betty, I could lay hands on some medicine what was especially useful for the kind of trouble she was in (meaning the Doctor’s supply of paregoric). Betty’d wanted to go with Kat, who was starting to vomit pretty violently by the time she left; but Frankie was still angry at her for leaving that morning, and so Kat’d had to set out on her own, and was probably at Seventeenth Street now.

I ran back over toward City Hall Park to hire a cab, picturing in my mind Kat all huddled up where she’d hidden once before, in among the hedges what ran along the border of the Doctor’s front yard. She’d looked pretty awful then, and what with Betty’s strange report I didn’t expect her to appear much better when I found her this time: her sudden exit from the Dusters’ probably indicated another lack of burny, from which she was now feeling the effects. We’d have to repeat the treatment what’d helped her the last time around, though it would cost me another lecture from the Doctor; but at least I’d be able to help her once I got her into the house.

I found her just where I’d figured to, balled up like a newborn kitten in among the greenery to the side of the front yard, wearing the dress she always did in summer: an old, light job that showed off the curves what were still forming in her young body. She was asleep, clutching her bag tight to her stomach and breathing in quick little gasps. There were a couple of pools of vomit—really not much more than bile, given that she’d been retching for so long—lying on the ground behind her curled back, and her face was the color of old ashes. Big charcoal-colored circles had formed under her eyes, and as I took her hand I noted that her fingernails were starting to turn a strange and disturbing sort of color, like they’d been stepped on.

Even I could see that she was much sicker than she’d been last time.

As I wiped a few sweat-drenched strands of blond hair out of Kat’s face, I noted that her skin was strangely cool to the touch; and when I tried to get her to wake up, it took a good minute of gently slapping her palms and calling her name to do the job. As soon as she started to come around she grabbed at her gut especially hard, then retched again, bringing up nothing at all this time. Her head swaying as I helped her to sit up, she seemed to have trouble focusing her blue eyes.

“Stevie…” she breathed, falling against my chest. “Oh, God, I’ve got a awful pain in my gut …”

“I know,” I said, trying to pull her up so’s I could get her inside. “Betty told me. How long you been without the burny, Kat?”

She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t but a little. “It ain’t that. I’ve got a whole tin of the stuff, and I been blowing it all morning. This is something else …” As she stood up, the pain in her midsection seemed to ease a little bit, and she looked up to really see my face for the first time. “Well,” she whispered, with a small smile, “I ain’t generally at my best when we see each other, am I?”

I smiled back at her as best I could, and brushed some more hair out of her face. “You’ll be fine. Just got to get you inside and fixed up.”

She tightened her grip on my shirt, looking very worried and maybe a little ashamed. “I tried, Stevie—I told your friend Mr. Moore I’d look out for the kid, and I really did try, but the pain got so bad—”

“It’s okay, Kat,” I said, holding on to her tighter. “You done good—we got somebody else watching the place now. Somebody Libby won’t be able to get away from.”

“Yeah,