The Confessor Read Free Page B

silenced him, and then he spoke very softly into the man’s ear.
    ‘Don’t talk. Don’t move. Relax.’ There was a light touch to the words, an almost paternal promise in them.
Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
    The man riding shotgun got out, nervously grinding a fist into his other palm.
    ‘Let him go!’ said the woman. She reached into the front seat, and then straightened back up with an aluminum bat in hand. The green paint was scuffed in places. ‘Right now, motherfucker!’
    The man in Geiger’s grasp chuckled coarsely. ‘Meet my girlfriend, Abdul.’
    Geiger was studying her – the straightness of her spine, how her fingers moved in a repetitive motion around the bat’s neck. She knew the feel of it. She’d used it before.
    The woman shot a look at her friend. ‘Let’s do this, Jamie.’ He nodded, and the two started forward. Five strides, at the most.
    Geiger leaned to the driver’s ear. ‘Douglas . . . we have a change of plans.’
    ‘Gonna let me go – huh, asshole?’
    Geiger shifted his forearm, fingers curling stiffly, and dug into the front of the man’s neck above the clavicle. The man’s brain received an instant message from the brachial plexus – of a sudden, massive shock to the nervous system – and he blacked out and went rag-doll limp. Geiger’s forearm kept him from falling. The others stopped with a synchronized flinch, as if they’d run into an invisible force-field.
    ‘Jesus Christ . . .’ slipped out of the other man.
    The girlfriend raised the bat. ‘Motherfucker! What’d you do to him?!’
    ‘Douglas is unconscious.’ He felt the smooth march of blood, saw the darkest part of him watching it all. The Inquisitor nodded at him.
There are numerous applications of pain.
‘You both need to get back in the truck.’
There is pressure, blunt force, application of intense heat and cold, manipulation of joints . . .
‘Do what I tell you.’
    The woman put the bat on her shoulder. Confusion and awe tugged at an eyebrow.
    ‘Who the fuck
are
you?’
    Geiger parsed her timbre and cadence and found as much fear as fury, which was a good thing.
    ‘Put the bat down, get in the truck – and close the doors. When I’ve gone, give Douglas a few slaps on the cheeks and move his head side to side. He’ll wake up.’
    The second man was shaking his head like a bystander at the scene of an accident.
    ‘Did you two hear what I said?’ Geiger’s voice was that of a patient teacher in a rowdy classroom, and it made his students look at him with something akin to dread.
    ‘Motherfucker,’ snarled the woman, and dropped the bat. The second man gratefully took it as a cue, and they walked to the truck, got in and slammed the doors.
    Geiger dragged the body to the corner farthest from the truck, watching them watch him. He lowered the driver to the sidewalk and propped him against a lamppost. He could smell oily smoke starting to crowd the air. A second fire engine’s siren called out to the first, like a beast seeking a mate. Something was burning down close by.
    Geiger put his earbuds back in place and resumed his run. He took a different route each time – and had another half-hour before he got there. Dylan’s sandpaper rasp was in his ears.
‘Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – do you, Mr. Jones?’

2
     
    In this jam-packed, crazy-quilt, rackety part of the city, the
crack!
jolting Harry Boddicker out of his doze could have been any number of things – a car backfire, a shout, a gunshot – but his mind thought the sound was a salvo of fireworks . . . because the dream he’d been trapped in, as was often the case, was about July Fourth. He’d fallen asleep in the folding chair on the fire escape outside his fourth-floor walkup on Henry Street in Chinatown – the perch where he now observed life on Planet Earth. He could have been a gargoyle on a ledge peering down at the shifting, joyful madness.
    He’d had two reasons for