Bob's Greatest Mistake_Part Two of The Journals of Bob Drifter Page 9

  “I’m sorry,” Richard admitted. “My wife didn’t die, but I lost her recently. I’m angry and sad. As bad as I feel, it can’t compare to what you’ve gone through. You don’t deserve any more stress.” But I know who deserves my rage.

  Only he wasn’t so sure of that anymore. He’d started interviewing families to see if the parents noticed any special relationships between Drifter and their children. The teacher spent a lot of time with his victims before he killed them. Hertly noticed that in the last year of tracking the man. Someone would die, and everyone who knew that person had some sappy story about how Bob helped the deceased do this last thing or live this one dream or some such nonsense. He killed people, and they thanked him for it. Morons. Would I have ever thought so ill of the dead before Kyle died?

  Richard took another sip of tea to silence his own mental argument. The point of the interviews was to see if Drifter had had a chance to get close to anyone, a potential target. Only not one of the families Richard had spoken to had ever spent more than five minutes with the teacher.

  Then there was that thing Richard saw after the accident. It had to be some guy dressed up or just a trick of his eyes trying to get over the image of all those bodies. Whatever it was didn’t look happy to see him or Drifter. The former policeman wanted to tell himself it was just a crazy trick of his imagination, but he didn’t put seven rounds in any figment. He put seven bullets in the center mass of whatever it was, and the thing only screamed at him. Standard military armor could take 9mm rounds, but Richard had never seen a guy stand up without a bit of help afterward, much less take every bullet without so much as a backpedal.

  “I have to ask, ma’am,” Richard said, trying to get back to the task at hand. “Do you have any reason to believe this was more than an accident?”

  “No!” Christine said in shock. “The police said there was no reason to believe it was like that. Do you know something they didn’t tell me?”

  “No,” Richard lied. A part of him hated how good he’d become at lying. “They’re certain it was an accident.” But I’m certain it wasn’t. “These are just procedural questions I have to ask.

  Christine stared at her tea for a moment. “I wonder ...” she said.

  “What?” Richard asked when he noticed she didn’t mean to continue.

  “You said lost your wife, but she didn’t die. What happened?”

  I let her go to chase a killer, a small voice in Richard’s mind answered. “We’re separated. My work got in the way.”

  “You should go back to her,” Christine said. “Family ...” She started crying before she could say anything else. Richard gave her a tissue and sat beside her trying to be comforting but only managing to look like an idiot.

  He wondered about his wife. Was she crying? Was some asshole comforting her? Would she take him back? If he went home that second and begged, would she forgive him? The image of more than forty dead children erased his questions.

  “I want to,” he told Christine. “But I don’t know that I could forgive myself if I didn’t do everything I could to ...” he nearly blew his cover talking about getting lost in his work. “ ... to do my job right. I wouldn’t feel right going home.”

  “If you’re a husband, your job is to love your wife,” Christine said sternly.

  Richard wanted to argue, but he couldn’t find a leg to stand on. This woman didn’t understand. True, she had lost her son. That was terrible and should have never happened. But if she knew the man responsible had gotten away with it, she’d move heaven and Earth to track him down. She had closure. She had people tell her it was an accident. The man who ran into the bus had died. It wasn’t pretty, but it was clean and complete. There were no unanswered questions or unpunished people to blame.

  She could move on because, as far as she knew, there was no one responsible. It was just some terrible mistake. Richard knew better. Do you? the small voice asked. It seemed like Kyle challenging his line of thought. Kyle noticed everything. Richard didn’t, but he did notice one thing in the accident. The person screaming in horror before Richard could see what had happened was Drifter. He screamed in terror and then passed out in pain. That wasn’t something a brilliant killer did.

  Richard came to Syracuse to gather the last piece of evidence he needed to turn the bastard in and get on with life. Only, he’d found more questions. He thought he had one last closet to open, and when he did, a platoon of skeletons climbed out, proving he had a lot more investigating to do.

  21

  Finding Sparks

  Patience took a deep breath before knocking on Bob’s door. He’d only gone through the motions the last three weeks. She liked to think that his attempt at pleasantness was for her, but that wasn’t good enough. She wanted to be happy with him, not for him to act happy for her.

  When he opened the door, she noticed his disheveled look before he plastered a smile on his face. Maybe, just maybe, he smiled at the sight of her, but it wasn’t the same. What she saw in him was his compassion and joy in life. The accident had hurt that part of him, and she meant to give it back.

  “Get your shoes on,” she told him as she slid by him past the door.

  “Where am I going?” he asked. She walked through his living room into the bedroom without so much as glancing in his direction.

  “I have a job today, and the college student who normally helps me can’t. That means you have to.” She opened his closet door and began selecting something for him to wear, grinning when she realized he didn’t exactly have a large wardrobe.

  “I don’t know anything about photography,” he said. She watched him walk around his bed. The cast had come off a few days earlier; the doctor said his knee seemed fine. He really was lucky. Most of the bruises were gone, and while he walked a little slowly, he seemed more or less as recovered as anyone could be only a month after an accident like that.

  Patience noticed his face and stifled a chuckle. She could tell he didn’t know whether to find his situation frustrating or baffling. “Lucky for you, I don’t need a photographer. I need someone smart enough to hold a light where I tell him to.”

  “I was actually—”

  “Busy not doing anything?” Patience interrupted him. She found a pair of slacks that looked like an iron might have come near it once in the past week. She set it on the bed and started riffling through his shirts. “I don’t even see an open book, which means you’ve been in here not doing anything.”

  “I’ve been working,” Bob said sullenly. He said it as if he hated his work, which worried her.

  “Just working isn’t enough for you.” Patience selected a shirt and walked up to see how it looked on him. It was a deep blue, and she discarded it. It was too dark, and he’d been dark enough lately.

  “I don’t think I—”

  “This is the part where I warn you, Bob,” she interrupted him again. “This can be about you, and I leave, or it can be about us and we can work through this. That’s the deal.”

  She tried not to hold her breath. When that didn’t work, she tried to hide the fact that she did it. What are you doing? she mentally shouted at herself. You can’t leave him. If he wasn’t willing to let her in, she thought it was better to learn that up front than to become more attached than she already was.

  “Us,” Bob answered, giving her a smile that was more for her than it was for him. “But can I pick out my own shirt?”

  “No,” she said simply. “Because you have to shower.”

  He cleaned himself up and put on the outfit she picked out. The sky-blue shirt she selected made him look more cheerful. She’d worked with enough models to know that if you make a person look a certain way, he started to feel that way, given enough time.

  “Why are we at the hospital?” he asked when she pulled into the parking lot.

  “I have a contract with the hospital. It’s a project I started called ‘Baby’s First Pictures.’” She loaded him up with her light kit, spare camera, and memory
-card wallet.

  “If this is an ‘us’ thing, why am I carrying all the stuff?” he asked, grunting when she hung her purse on his shoulder.

  “It’s the life of an assistant,” she said, smiling at him. “I do all the mental work, and you do all the physical labor.”

  “I can think,” he argued.

  “Of course you can,” she said in a teasingly sarcastic way.

  “Why is it that your teasing me makes me want to laugh?” he asked as they walked into the hospital.

  “You’re a glutton for punishment.”

  “Only from you, apparently.”

  “We’re in an exclusive relationship.”

  “In which I can’t tease you?”

  “Of course you could, if I weren’t the most wonderful woman you’d ever met.”

  “Is there a way to respond to that without risking a hostile glare or worse?”

  She laughed. “I’ve never been made of glass.”

  “Glass is less sharp than you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “At least it doesn’t make noise when I look at it.”

  She turned to look at him. Is he teasing me back? “Are you implying that I talk a lot?”

  “Only compared to an auctioneer.”

  She smiled at the joke. “Come on, labor guy.”

  “Right behind you, motor mouth.” She laughed again. He wasn’t laughing, but at least he wasn’t moping, either.

  They made their way to the maternity ward, and Patience began setting up shop. She only used two lights. One light went on a tripod with a large, white, soft box. A light that big was going to make any baby look angelic. The hospital let her keep her small table and mirror in the room she used every week. She wiped down the mirror and set her smaller backlight up just out of the frame of her shot. The backlight helped separate the child from the background, and parents seemed to like the reflection of their babies in the mirror.

  “Is this the part where you confess you didn’t need any help?” Bob asked her, watching her do most of the work.

  “It’s not my fault you’re lazy.” She looked up from the table and caught him nudging her soft box. “Don’t touch that!” she yelped. He stepped back as if it might explode. “Sorry, but if the light hits the mirror instead of the baby, it’ll ruin the reflection.”

  “So this is the part where you confess.”

  “I confess to nothing.”

  “Then it must be the part where I thank you.” He wrapped her in his arms and kissed the top of her head. “I needed this.”

  A nurse came in, rolling a clear crib complete with a newborn babe inside. The older woman exchanged pleasantries with Patience before heading out. A moment later, a woman in a hospital gown with a man, presumably her husband, holding her hand. Patience gave them her over-rehearsed introduction. The baby started crying.

  “May I?” Bob asked.

  The parents looked at Patience, who nodded. The baby started cooing the moment Bob touched him.

  “You don’t say?” he asked the baby boy. “I’m afraid you can’t have her. You see, she’s my girlfriend.”

  The baby gurgled.

  “There’ll be other women. You’re young, after all.” He set the baby down on the mirror carefully. “Isn’t this the part where you take photos?” he asked her. She shook her head in amazement. It was like he was a natural at everything.

  She lost herself in her work. She framed the images and shifted the light so it was just right. Meanwhile, Bob played with the babies, kept them calm, and talked with the parents. He made her work so much easier. Two hours flew by without so much as one crying child or nervous parent. She let him help pack up the light kit. She noticed him frowning and grabbed his hand.

  “We don’t just live and die,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “No,” she replied. “You believe that sometimes, parts of us move on.” He had told her as much during one of their walks at the park. “You think a person’s soul is passed on to others, but that’s not the only way parts of that person move on.”

  She used her free hand to lightly touch his cheek. “Bob, the memories we have of each other stay with us, too.”

  “I wish I could explain,” he said in frustration.

  “I know,” she told him. He actually had a very specific idea about what happened to a person’s soul. “I think a soul exists, and I think it’s important they get to where they’re going, but that’s just a part of a bigger picture, Bob. It may be the most special part, but the memories you have of someone can be passed on, too, can’t they?”

  He didn’t respond as he shouldered his bag and her camera gear. They went back to the nursery to sign out, only the nurse was gone. “Does it matter?” Bob asked.

  “I have to sign out,” she explained.

  “I can wait here while you put everything away.”

  “Are you trying to make me do all the work?”

  “Unless you don’t think you can handle it,” he said in a challenging tone.

  She stubbornly shouldered her light-kit bag and headed to the car. She heard a few of the babies start crying when she left the nursery. She made it a point to rush to her car and back.

  When she came out of the elevator, she realized she didn’t hear the babies crying. The nurse was just outside the door. Patience opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but the nurse put a finger against her lips and pointed inside.

  Bob had pulled up a chair and started reading to a group of sleeping newborns. He had The Boxcar Children open on his lap and read in a quite clear voice.

  “‘We are all pretty tired and hungry,’ he said,’” Bob read, using a high-pitched voice to imitate a small boy. He continued reading, but Patience didn’t hear what he said. She looked at the man who was reading quietly, using different voices for each character.

  “They were all fussing and crying when I came down the hall,” the nurse told Patience. “Then he sits down and opens that book. He starts reading, and I swear to you, they all just stopped crying, as if they wanted to listen to him. The most amazing thing I ever saw.”

  “He is that,” she said, watching him. She walked in as he finished reading a paragraph.

  He looked up at her as he closed the book, stood up, and looked into her eyes. Oh, dear, she thought to herself. If she blushed, she swore she’d jump out the window. She wasn’t some teenager caught up in romance at prom.

  “I’ve made something for you,” he said, smiling. It was a real smile. It was for her, but he gave it in real happiness.

  “What?”

  He grasped her hand and put it over his heart. “I’ve made a place for you here; should you ever care to stay, you can for as long as you like.”

  I will not cry like I’m in some sappy romance movie! “As long as I like, Mr. ‘I tend to move a lot?’” she asked, teasing him. She tried to pull her hand away, but he didn’t let it go. It was exactly the right thing for him to do.

  “I don’t care where I go,” he said. “That’s not the point. The point is you’ll be there with me if you wish to be.”

  She stepped into his arms. “I guess it’s only fair,” she said, letting her face rest on his chest. “You’ve already got a place for yourself.” She knew it was true the moment she said it. It scared her to think of it. She was his. She gave herself over to him and damned the cost. He made her feel like she mattered, if only because she mattered to him. She loved him for that more than for anything else.

  22

  Tracking a Monster

  After calling every Journeyman he could remember even being rumored to have any knowledge of Grimm or Blacksouls, Drisc was left standing in the middle of the lonely patch of road in Liverpool where Grimm’s last atrocity had happened.

  He didn’t bother Bob with too much. He seemed happy with Patience, and Drisc felt he deserved a little happiness. Robin had wanted to throw a fit about that as well. Journeymen, as a rule, were not supposed to get overly attached to a mortal. How
would a Journeyman feel when he found out his wife was about to die? Drisc told her to shut the fuck up and hung up the phone.

  It didn’t make her wrong; it just made him feel better. Just the day before, Drisc had taken Bob and his lady love out for a bit of fun. The poor bastard’s knee was still pretty stiff. Maybe dancing was a bad idea, but it was a great joke. The couple got a good laugh out of it once Drisc explained why it was funny.

  He drank, and they all talked about anything that had nothing to do with school, buses, death, or sadness. Drisc wanted to get nice and hammered and then sleep for a few days—only he had as much information as he was going to get, so he had to see if he could track down where Grimm might have run off to.

  Drisc searched the obituaries and tried to eliminate which recent deaths since the bus crash might belong to Grimm. The problem was that there were at least six Journeymen in the area, which was too many. The first order of business was to send the Council members back to wherever they were supposed to be working normally.

  The second task was to try an idea Drisc wasn’t sure had ever been attempted before. As with most Journeymen, Drisc could Sense death, but he wondered if the Death Sense lingered after the souls were taken. He’d learned to filter his extra senses the same way a mortal would filter his hearing. He stood, trying to focus on his Death Sense.

  He couldn’t find any trail of a soul or a pending death, but he felt ... vacancies ... at the scene of the crash. He tried to find a way to explain it to himself, but the truth of the matter was he felt nothing. It wasn’t a lack of a soul; it was the lack of anything. It was as if the souls that had perished there took the area they died in with them. His eyes could see the road, its black tar glistening under the melted sheet of snow and rock salt that had fallen earlier in the morning, but his Death Sense told him the street wasn’t there. Nothing was there, and nothing would ever be there again.

  Is that how the bastard does it? Drisc wondered. If Blacksouls created that sense of nothing, it would explain how Grimm could hide his presence from other Journeymen. Grimm had mastered his Blacksouls. They could take whatever shape he wanted and hide his presence, and he could apparently travel through shadows. Could they offer something stronger than a Death Sense? If Blacksouls gave him more power, was that the only goal for him?