Jilly didn’t like knives. She had become a comedian, not part of a knife-throwing act. She desperately didn’t want to go into a house with a knife collection and a Kenny.
Two minutes ago, when Jilly had entered the kitchen and had hung up the telephone one digit short of disaster, poor Marj seemed dazed, numb. Now the candy-striped semizombie was rapidly transforming into an emotionally distraught grandmother capable of reckless action. ‘We gotta get Travis!’
The last thing Jilly needed was a knife in her chest, but the next-to-last thing she needed was a hysterical grandmother barging back into the house, complicating Dylan’s situation, most likely going for the phone again the moment she caught sight of it and was reminded that the police were always waiting to serve.
‘You stay here, Marj. You stay right here. This is my job. I’ll find Travis. I’ll get him out of there.’
As Jilly turned away, having committed to being braver than she preferred to be, Marj grabbed her by the arm. ‘Who are you people?’
You people. Jilly almost reacted to those two innocent words, you people, rather than to the question. She almost said, What do you mean – YOU PEOPLE? You have a problem with people like me?
During the past couple years, however, as she had gained some acceptance with her act and had achieved at least a small measure of success, her hot-tempered knee-jerk reactions to perceived insults had seemed increasingly stupid. Even in response to Dylan – who for some reason had the power to push her go-nuts button as no one before him – even in response to him, the knee-jerk reactions were stupid. And under current circumstances, they were dangerously distracting, as well.
‘Police,’ she lied with surprising ease for a former choirgirl. ‘We’re police.’
‘No uniforms?’ Marj wondered.
‘We’re undercover.’ She didn’t offer to produce a badge. ‘Stay here, sweetie. Stay here where it’s safe. Let the pros handle this.’
* * *
The boy in the FDNY T-shirt had been overpowered, beaten, and most likely knocked unconscious, although he had revived by the time Dylan entered his room. One blackened and swollen eye. Abraded chin. Blood caked in his left ear from a blow to the side of the head.
Pulling strips of adhesive tape off the kid’s face, prying a red rubber ball from the pale-lipped mouth, Dylan vividly recalled being helpless in the motel-room chair, remembered gagging on the athletic sock, and he discovered in himself a settled anger like long-banked coals ready to flare white-hot when fanned by one breath of righteous outrage. This potentially volcanic anger seemed out of character for an easygoing man who believed that even the most savage heart could be brought out of darkness by the recognition of the deeply beautiful design of the natural world, of life. For years he’d turned the other cheek so often that at times he must have looked like a spectator at a perpetual tennis match.
His anger wasn’t fueled by what he had suffered, however, nor even by what he might yet have to endure as his stuff-driven fate played out in days to come, but by sympathy for the boy and by pity for all victims in this age of violence. After Judgment, perhaps the meek would inherit the earth for their playing field, as promised; but meanwhile, the vicious had their sport, day after bloody day.
Dylan had always been aware of injustice in the world, but he’d never cared as intensely as this, had never before felt the twisting auger of injustice boring through his heart. The poignancy and purity of his anger surprised him, for it seemed greatly out of proportion to the apparent cause. One battered boy was not Auschwitz, not the mass graves of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, not the World Trade Center.
Something profound was happening to him, all right, but the transfiguration wasn’t limited to the acquisition of a sixth sense. Deeper and more fearsome changes were occurring, tectonic shifts in the deepest bedrock of his mind.
Gag removed, free to speak, the boy proved self-controlled and capable of getting at once to the quick of the situation. Whispering, his gaze fixed on the open door as if it were a portal through which the most hideous troops in Hell’s army might march at any moment, he said, ‘Kenny’s wired at least six ways. Full-on psycho. Got a girl in Grandma’s room, I think he’ll kill her. Then Grandma. Then me. He’ll kill me last ’cause he hates me most.’