Repairman Jack [10]-Harbingers Read Free

want."
    "Her."

3

    Jack hopped out of the cab at Hudson and Worth and looked around. He hadn't taken time to change. Kept the jeans and beat-up bomber jacket he'd worn to the doctor's. He noticed a bearded guy on the corner. A ragged-cut square of cardboard with a crudely printed message dangled from his neck.

    The guy could have been anywhere from forty to seventy. A flap-eared cap covered much of his head. A dirty, gray, Leland Sklar—class beard hid pretty much everything else. He wore what looked like a dozen layers of sweaters and coats, none of which had seen the inside of a washing machine since the Koch administration. He jiggled the change in the blue-and-white coffee container clutched in his gloved hand.
    Louie had said look for a beard hanging around Worth and Hudson. This could be him.
    "Cool sign," Jack said. "How's it working for you?"
    "A gold mine," he said without inflection. He kept his eyes straight ahead. "Get 'em to smile and they part with some change."
    "Mickey's got an 'e' in it."
    Still no look. "So I been told."
    "You Rico?"
    Now he looked. "Yeah. You Jack?"
    "Hear you saw something."
    "Maybe. Heard there was a reward for finding a red-haired kid, so I been keeping my eyes open."
    "And?"
    "Follow me."
    He led Jack around a couple of corners, then stopped across the street from an ancient five-story, brick-fronted building.
    "I seen three guys carrying a red-haired girl through the cellar door over there."
    The building looked deserted. The scaffolding and boarded-up windows said remodeling in progress.
    Rico said, "Lucky thing I was looking that way because it happened so fast I'd 'a missed it."
    This didn't sound good, even if she wasn't Timmy's niece.
    "What was she wearing?"
    "Couldn't tell. Had her wrapped up in a sheet but I saw her head. Had Little Orphan Annie hair."
    Jack pulled out Cailin's photo.
    "This her?"
    "Never saw her face, but the hair's pretty much the same."
    "When did all this go down?"
    "Soon as it started gettin' dark."
    "I mean what time?"
    "Ain't got no watch, mister."
    Jack did. He checked it: 5:30. Full dark now. Sunset came between four-thirty and five these days, but the streets started to murk up before that. She could have been in there for an hour or more.
    "Struggling?"
    "Nope. Looked asleep. Or dead maybe."
    Cailin or not, he'd have to go take a look. As he stepped toward the curb Rico grabbed his arm.
    "Don't I get my money?"
    "If it's the right girl, yeah."
    "How's about a little advance? I'm a tad short."
    Jack nodded toward the sign. "I thought that was a gold mine."
    "Traffic's been light. C'mon, man."
    Jack fished out a ten and gave it to him. Rico checked it, then grinned, showing both his mustard-colored teeth.
    "Bless you, sir! I'm gonna use this to buy me a nice bowl of hot chili!"
    Jack had to smile as he crossed the street.
    Right.
    He approached the rusty, wrought-iron railing that guarded the stone steps to the cellar. He leaned over for a look. Light filtered around the edges of the chipped and warped door at the bottom. But no window.
    He stepped back and looked around. To his right he saw an alley just wide enough for a garbage can. In fact, two brimming cans stood back to back at the building line. Behind them, faint yellow light oozed from a small, street-level window. The alley dead-ended at a high brick wall.
    Jack placed a hand against each of the sidewalls and levered himself over the garbage cans, then knelt by the window. He wiped off the layer of grime and peered through. Took him a few seconds to orient himself, to make sense out of what he was seeing.
    "Shit."
    A naked red-haired, teenage girl was strapped to a long table. Jack didn't need to pull out the photo again. He recognized her. Cailin wasn't moving. Her eyes were closed. Could have been dead, but the duct tape over her mouth said otherwise. Didn't need to gag a corpse. She looked unharmed.
    Three lean, shaggy-haired men dressed in jeans and sweatshirts hovered around her. Two