The nearer realm was dusted, swept, more elaborately appointed than a monk’s cell but every bit as neat as any friar’s habitat.
Disorder ruled in the far kingdom. The bedclothes were tangled. Dirty socks, discarded shoes, empty soda and beer cans, and crumpled candy wrappers littered the floor, the nightstand, and the shelf atop the headboard of the bed. Only the knives and other edge weapons had been arranged with care – if not with loving calculation – and judging by the mirror-bright gleam of every blade, much time had been devoted to their maintenance.
A pair of suitcases stood side by side in the center of the room, on the border between these rival encampments. A black cowboy hat with a green feather in the band was perched atop the luggage.
All this Dylan noted in one quick survey of the scene lasting but three or four seconds, much as he had long been accustomed to absorbing entire landscapes in vivid detail with an initial sweeping gaze, in order to assess at first glance, before his head overruled his heart, whether the subject merited the time and the energy that he would have to expend to paint it and to paint it well. The talent with which he’d been born included instant photographic perception, but he dramatically enhanced it with training, as he imagined that a gifted young cop consciously honed his natural skills of observation until he earned detective status.
As any good cop would have done, Dylan began and ended this initial sweep with the detail that most immediately and strikingly denned the scene: a boy of about thirteen sat in the nearest bed, wearing jeans and a New York City Fire Department T-shirt, shackled at the ankles, cruelly gagged, and handcuffed to the brass headboard.
* * *
Marj did her immovable-object shtick far better than Jilly could pull off her irresistible-force act. Still anchored to the porch at the top of the steps, she said worriedly, ‘We’ve got to get him.’
Although Dylan wasn’t her fella, Jilly didn’t know how otherwise to refer to him, since she didn’t want to use his real name in front of this woman and because she didn’t know what food he had ordered earlier. ‘Don’t worry. My fella will get him, Marj.’
‘I don’t mean get Kenny,’ Marj said with more distress than she had shown previously.
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Travis. I mean Travis. All he’s got is books. Kenny has knives, but Travis has just his books.’
‘Who’s Travis?’
‘Kenny’s little brother. He’s thirteen. Kenny has a breakdown, it’ll be Travis who gets broke.’
‘And Travis – he’s in there with Kenny?’
‘Must be. We’ve got to get him out.’
At the far end of the back porch from them, the kitchen door still stood open. Jilly didn’t want to return to the house.
She didn’t know why Dylan had come here at high speed, risking life and limb and increased insurance premiums, but she doubted that he’d been compelled by a belated need to thank Marj for her courteous service or by a desire to return the toad button so that it might be given to another customer who would better appreciate it. Based on what little information Jilly possessed and considering what an X-Files night this had become, the smart-money bet was that Mr. Dylan Something’s-happening-to-me O’Conner had raced to this house to stop Kenny from doing a bad thing with his knife collection.
If a burst of psychic perception had led Dylan to Kenny of the Many Knives, whom he had apparently never met previously, then logic suggested that he would be aware of Travis, too. When he encountered a thirteen-year-old boy armed with a book, he wasn’t going to mistake the kid for a doped-up nineteen-year-old knife maniac.
That train of thought, however, was derailed by the word logic. The events of the past couple hours had thrown baby Logic out the window with the bathwater of reason. Nothing happening to them this night would have been possible in the rational world where Jilly had grown up from choirgirl to comedian. This was a new world, either with an entirely new logic that she hadn’t puzzled out yet or with no logic at all, and in such a world, anything could happen to Dylan in a strange house, in the dark.