The Bible Repairman and Other Stories Read Free Page A

call Seaweed in Corona.”
    “I don’t want you to ransom a ghost,” the man said, holding the box toward Torrez. “I already had old Humberto do that, yesterday. This is for you.”
    “If Humberto ransomed your daughter,” Torrez said carefully, nodding toward the box but not taking it, “then why are you here?”
    “My
daughter is
not
a ghost. My daughter is twelve years old, and this man took her when she was walking home from school. I can pay you fifteen hundred dollars to get her back – this is extra, a gift for you, from me, with the help of Humberto.”
    Torrez had stepped back. “Your daughter was kidnapped? Alive? Good God, man, call the police right now! The FBI! You don’t come to
me
with –”
    “The police would not take the ransom note seriously,” the man said, shaking his head. “They would think he wants money really, they would not think of his terms being sincerely meant, as he wrote them!” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Here,” he said, extending the box again.
    Torrez took the box – it was light – and cautiously lifted the lid.
    Inside, in a nest of rosemary sprigs and Catholic holy cards, lay a little cloth doll that Torrez recognized.
    “Amelia,” he said softly.
    He lifted it out of the box, and he could feel the quiver of his own daughter’s long-lost ghost in it.
    “Humberto bought this back for you?” Torrez asked. Three years after her kidnapping, he thought. No wonder Humberto waved to me this morning! I hope he didn’t have to spend much of his soul on her; he’s got no more than a mouse’s worth left.
    “For you,” the man said. “She is a gift. Save my daughter.”
    Torrez didn’t want to invite the man into the house. “What did the ransom note for your daughter say?”
    “It said, Juan-Manuel Ortega – that’s me – I have Elizabeth, and I will kill her and take all her blood unless you
induce
Terry Torrez to come to me and him give me the ransom blood instead.”
    “Call the police,” Torrez said. “That’s a bluff, about taking her blood. Why would he want a little girl’s blood? When did this happen? Every minute –”
    Juan-Manuel Ortega opened his mouth very wide, as if to pronounce some big syllable, then closed it. “My Elizabeth,” he said, “she – killed her sister last year. My rifle was in the closet – she didn’t know, she’s a child, she didn’t know it was loaded –”
    Torrez could feel that his eyebrows were raised. Yes she did, he thought; she killed her sister deliberately, and broke her own soul doing it, and the kidnapper knows it even if you truly don’t.
    Your daughter’s a murderer. She’s like me.
    Still, her blood – her broken, blunting soul – wouldn’t be accessible to the kidnapper, the way Torrez’s would be, unless …
    “Has your daughter –” He had spoken too harshly, and tried again. “Has she ever used magic?” Or is her soul still virginal, he thought.
    Ortega bared his teeth and shrugged. “Maybe! She said she caught her sister’s ghost in my electric shaver. I – I think she did. I don’t use it anymore, but think I hear it in the nights.”
    Then her blood will do for the kidnapper what mine would, Torrez thought. Not quite as well, since my soul is surely more opaque – older and more stained by the use of magic–but hers will do if he can’t get mine.
    “Here is my phone number,” said Ortega, now shoving a business card at Torrez and talking too rapidly to interrupt, “and the kidnapper has your number. He wants only you. I am leaving it in your hands. Save my daughter, please.”
    Then he turned around and ran down the walkway to a van parked behind Torrez’s Toyota. Torrez started after him, but the sun-glare in his bad left eye made him uncertain of his footing, and he stopped when he heard the van shift into gear and start away. The man’s wife must have been waiting behind the wheel.
    I should call the police myself, Torrez thought as he lost sight of the