Sacred

“Shaken,” I said. “Not stirred.”

I turned my head in the direction of the voice, and my eyes met only a hard yellow light fringed by a soft brown. I blinked, felt the room slide a bit.

“Sorry about the narcotics,” the voice said. “If there had been any other way…”

“No regrets, sir,” a voice I recognized as Lurch’s said. “There was no other way.”

“Julian, please give Ms. Gennaro and Mr. Kenzie some aspirin.” The voice sighed behind the hard yellow light. “And untie them, please.”

“If they move?” The Weeble’s voice.

“See that they don’t, Mr. Clifton.”

“Yes, sir. I’d be happy to.”

“My name is Trevor Stone,” the man behind the light said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

I rubbed at the red marks on my wrists.

Angie rubbed hers, sucked a few gulps of oxygen from what I assumed was Trevor Stone’s study.

“I asked you a question.”

I looked into the yellow light. “Yes, you did. Very good for you.” I turned to Angie. “How you doing?”

“My wrists hurt and so does my head.”

“Otherwise?”

“I’m generally in a foul mood.”

I looked back into the light. “We’re in a foul mood.”

“I’d assume so.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Witty,” Trevor Stone said from behind the soft light and the Weeble and Lurch chuckled softly.

“Witty,” the Weeble repeated.

“Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” Trevor Stone said, “I can promise you that I don’t want to hurt you. I will, I suppose, but I don’t want to. I need your help.”

“Oh, well.” I stood up on wobbly legs, felt Angie rise beside me.

“If one of your morons could drive us home,” Angie said.

I gripped her hand as my legs swayed back against the couch and the room tilted to the right just a bit too much. Lurch pressed his index finger into my chest so lightly I barely felt it, and Angie and I fell back into the couch.

Another five minutes, I told my legs, and we’ll try it again.

“Mr. Kenzie,” Trevor Stone said, “you can keep trying to get up from that couch and we can keep knocking you back down with a feather for at least another, oh, thirty minutes by my estimate. So, relax.”

“Kidnapping,” Angie said. “Forced incarceration. Are you familiar with those terms, Mr. Stone?”

“I am.”

“Good. You understand that they’re both federal crimes, carrying pretty stiff penalties?”

“Mmm,” Trevor Stone said. “Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie, how acquainted are you with your own mortality?”

“We’ve had a few brushes,” Angie said.

“I’m aware of them,” he said.

Angie raised her eyebrows at me. I raised mine back.

“But those were brushes, as you said. Quick glimpses, here and gone. You’re both alive now, both young, both with reasonable expectations that you’ll be here on this Earth thirty or forty years from now. The world—its laws, its mores and customs, its mandatory sentences for federal crimes—holds sway over you. I, however, don’t have that problem anymore.”

“He’s a ghost,” I whispered, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs.

“Quite right, Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “Quite right.”

The yellow light swung away from my eyes, and I blinked into the black space that replaced it. A pinpoint of white in the center of the black pirouetted into several larger circles of orange and expanded past my field of vision like tracers. Then my vision cleared, and I was looking at Trevor Stone.

The top half of his face seemed to have been carved from blond oak—cliffs of eyebrows cutting shadows over hard green eyes, an aquiline nose, and pronounced cheekbones, flesh the color of pearl.

The lower half, however, had caved in on itself. His jaw had crumbled on both sides; the bones seemed to have melted somewhere into his mouth. His chin, worn to a nub, pointed straight down at the floor within the casing of a rubbery flap of skin, and his mouth had lost all shape whatsoever; it floated within the mess of his lower face like an amoeba, the lips seared white.

He could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old.

Tan bandages covered his throat in patches, wet like welts. As he stood from behind his massive desk, he leaned on a mahogany walking stick with a gold dragon’s head handgrip. His gray, glen plaid trousers billowed around his thin legs, but his blue cotton shirt and black linen jacket clung to his massive chest and shoulders as if they’d been born there. The hand gripping the cane looked capable of crushing golf balls to dust with a single squeeze.

He planted his feet and shook against the cane as he stared down at us.

“Take a good look,” Trevor Stone said, “and then let me tell you something about loss.”

2

“Last year,” Trevor Stone said, “my wife was driving back from a party at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. You’re familiar with it?”

“We throw all our functions there,” Angie said.

“Yes, well anyway, her car broke down. I was just leaving my office downtown when she called, and I picked her up. Funny.”

“What?” I said.

He blinked. “I was just remembering how little we’d done that. Driven together. It was the sort of thing that had become a casualty of my commitment to work. Something as simple as sitting side by side in a car for twenty minutes, and we were lucky if we did it six times in a year.”

“What happened?” Angie said.

He cleared his throat. “Coming off the Tobin Bridge, a car tried to run us off the road. A carjacking, I believe it’s called. I had just bought my car—a Jaguar XKE—and I wasn’t about to give it up to a pack of thugs who thought wanting something was the same thing as being entitled to it. So…”

He stared out a window for a moment, lost, I can only assume, in the crunching of metals and revving of engines, the smell of the air that night.

“My car flipped onto the driver’s side. My wife, Inez, couldn’t stop screaming. I didn’t know it then, but she’d shattered her spine. The carjackers were angry because I’d destroyed the car they presumably thought of as theirs already. They shot Inez to death as I tried to remain conscious. They kept firing into the car, and three bullets found my body. Oddly, none caused critical damage, though one lodged in my jaw. These three men then spent some time trying to light the car on fire, but they never thought to puncture the gas tank. After a time, they grew bored, and left. And I lay there with three bullets in my body and several broken bones and my wife dead beside me.”