The Haunted Air Read Free

it closed.
    â€œDamn! His answering service! So what. I’m going up there anyway.” She pushed herself up from the couch and staggered a step. “Gotta find a cab.”
    Gia glanced at Jack, concern in her eyes, then back to Junie. “You’ll never get one around here.”
    She grinned and hiked her miniskirt from mid-thigh to her hip. “Sure I will. Just like what’s-her-name in that movie.”
    â€œClaudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, ” Jack said automatically as he wondered when the last time was a cab had cruised the Brooklyn Army Terminal area at this hour. “And someone’ll think you’re looking for more than a ride if you do that. We’ll call you a cab.”
    â€œThey never come,” she said, heading for the door.
    Again that concerned look from Gia. “Jack, we can’t let her go. She’s in no condition—”
    â€œShe’s a grown-up.”
    â€œOnly nominally. Jack?”
    She cocked her head and looked at him with big, Girl Scout cookie-selling eyes. Refusing Gia anything was difficult, but when she did that …
    â€œOh, all right.” Donning a put-upon expression, he rose and offered a hand to help Gia to her feet; in truth he was delighted for an excuse to bail this party. “I’ll give her a ride. But it’s not ‘just up the road.’ It’s on the upper end of Queens.”
    Gia smiled, and it touched Jack right down to the base of his spine.
    Somehow, between saying good-bye to the hostess bride and reaching the sidewalk, they picked up two extra passengers: Karyn—the Bride of Frankenstein—and her friend Claude, an anorexic-looking six footer with a flattop haircut that jutted out over his forehead, making his head look like
an anvil from the side. They both thought a jaunt to a psychic’s house would be moby cool.
    Plenty of room in Jack’s Crown Vic. If he’d come alone, he probably would have traveled by subway. But Gia’s presence demanded the security of a car. With Gia in the passenger seat, and the other three in the back, Jack wheeled the big black Ford up a ramp onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed north along the elevated roadway. He said he hoped no one minded but he was opening all the windows, and he did, without waiting for answers. His car; they didn’t like it, they could walk.
    This kind of summer night, not too humid, not terribly hot, brought him back to his teens when he drove a beat-up old Corvair convertible that he got for a song because too many people had listened to Ralph Nader and dumped one of the best cars ever made. On nights like this he’d drive with no destination, always with the top down, letting the wind swirl around him.
    Not much swirling tonight. Even at this hour the BQE was crowded, but Junie made the creeping traffic seem even slower by rattling on and on about her psychic guru: Ifasen talked to the dead, and Ifasen let the dead talk to you, and Ifasen knew your deepest, darkest secrets and could do the most amazing, impossible, incredible things.
    Not amazing or impossible to Jack. He was familiar with all the amazing, impossible, incredible things Ifasen did, and even had a pretty good idea how the man was going to get back Junie’s bracelet for her.
    Yeah, Junie was a ditz, but a lovable ditz.
    Maybe some music would slow her Ifasen chatter. He stuck one of his homemade CDs in the player. John Lennon’s voice filled the car.
    â€œThis happened once before …”
    â€œThe Beatles?” Claude said from the back. “I didn’t think anyone listened to them anymore.”
    â€œThink again,” Jack said. He turned up the volume. “Listen to that harmony.”
    â€œ … I saw the light! …”

    â€œLennon and McCartney were born to sing together.”
    â€œYou have to realize,” Gia said, “that Jack doesn’t like anything modern.”
    â€œHow