Nightworld

3 • REPAIRMAN JACK

They weren't making muggers like they used to.

Jack had been trolling for about an hour now and this was the second he'd found—or rather had found him. Jack was wearing his Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt, acid-washed jeans, and an I ♥ New York visor. The compleat tourist. A piece of raw steak dangling before a hungry wolf.

When he'd spotted the guy tailing him, he'd wandered off the pavement and down into this leafy glade. Off to his right the mercury-vapor glow from Central Park West backlit the trees. Far behind his assailant he could make out the year-round Christmas lights on the trees that flanked the Tavern-on-the-Green.

Jack studied the guy facing him. A tall, hulking figure in the shadows, maybe twenty-five years, about six-feet, pushing two-hundred pounds, giving him an inch and thirty pounds on Jack. He had stringy brown hair bleached blond on top, all combed to the side so it hung over his right eye; the left side of his head above the ear and below the part had been buzzcut down to the scalp—Veronica Lake after a run-in with a lawn mower. Pale, pimply skin and a skull dangling on a chain from his left ear. Black boots, baggy black pants, black shirt, flngerless black leather gloves, one of which was wrapped around the handle of a big Special Forces knife, the point angled toward Jack's belly.

"You talking to me, Rambo?" Jack said.

"Yeah." The guy's voice was nasal. He twitched and sniffed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "I'm talkin' to you. You see anybody else around?"

Jack glanced around. "No. I guess if there were, you wouldn't have stopped me here."

"Gimme your wallet."

Jack looked him in the eye. This was the part he liked.

"No."

The guy jerked back as if he'd been slapped, then stared at Jack, obviously unsure of how to take that.

"What you say?"

"I said no. En-oh. What's the matter? You never heard that word before?"

Probably hadn't. Probably grew up in a home—"household" would no doubt be a more accurate term—where the parents were mere cohabitants, present now and then in body but hardly ever in spirit, who had endowed their offspring with their DNA and little else. A household in which no one gave enough of a damn to say no. Saying no meant you had to care about a kid. Saying no and meaning it meant you had to follow it up, be consistent. And that took effort. Or maybe he grew up in a place where one or both of his adult cohabitants beat the shit out of him every time he turned around, just for the hell of it, whether he was good or bad, till he didn't know which end was up.

You needed a license to drive a car, own a gun, dig a ditch, or sell hot dogs from a pushcart, but you didn't need a license to have a kid. The rationale for all the licenses was that those things affected public safety. Yet someone had popped this guy out a quarter of a century ago so he could spend his childhood being beaten or ignored or both, so he could grow up to spend his days sucking crack and his nights rolling people in Central Park. He was a loaded weapon. And that affected public safety.

So why didn't you have to have a license to be a parent?

Didn't matter where he started out—upper crust, middle class, poverty row—he'd left wherever he'd been, whether it was Boise or the Bronx, and had come here, to the Park, to be a menace, a walking time bomb waiting to go off. Didn't matter if he'd been abused or neglected as a kid, that was the past and Jack couldn't do anything about that. What did matter was that the guy was facing Jack here and now in the Park, and he was armed, dangerous, and lethal. That was what Jack had to deal with.

"You crazy?" the guy said, voice rising. "Gimme your wallet or I cut you. You wanna get cut?"

"No," Jack said. "Don't want to get cut." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. "I left my wallet home. Will this do?"

The guy's eyes all but bulged. His free hand darted out.

"Give it!"

Jack shoved it back into his pocket.

"No."

"You crazy fucker—!"

As the guy lunged at Jack, jabbing the bladepoint at his belly, Jack spun away, giving him plenty of room to miss. Not that he was worried about any surprises from the guy. Most of his type had wasted muscles and sluggish reflexes. But you had to respect that saw-toothed knife. It was a mean sucker.

The guy made a clumsy turn and came at Jack again, slashing high this time, at his face. Jack pulled his head back, grabbed the wrist behind the knife as it went by, got a two-handed grip, and twisted. Hard. The guy shouted with pain as he was jerked into an armlock with his weapon flattened between his shoulder blades. He kicked backward, landing a bootheel on one of Jack's shins. Jack winced with pain, gritted his teeth, and kicked the mugger's feet out from under him. As the guy went down on his face, Jack yanked the imprisoned arm back straight and rammed his right sneaker behind the shoulder, pinning him.

And then he stopped and counted to ten.

Jack knew it was at times like these that he was in danger of losing control. The blackness was there on the edges, beckoning him, urging him to go crazy on this guy, to take out all his accumulated anger, frustration, and rage on this one unlucky jerk.

Plenty accumulated during day to day life in this place. And every day it seemed to get a little worse.

The city had become ungovernable. Hardly anyone seemed to have any pride anymore, or possessed enough self-esteem to think anything was beneath them. Rip off an old lady's handbag or a toddler's candy bar. No item too small, no deed too low. Everything was up for grabs. Anything was okay if you got away with it. That was the operating ethic. "Mine" was anything I could take and keep. If you put something down and left it unguarded, it became mine if I could snatch it and make off with it. The civilized people were on the run. Those who could afford to were leaving, others were withdrawing, tightening their range of activities, limiting their hours on the street, in public. And those unfortunates who had to be out on the streets and on the subways, they were fodder. And they knew it.

On the way to the Park tonight Jack had passed car after car with "No Radio" signs in the windows. Every street was flanked with them. It was symptomatic of the city-dwellers' response to the predators. With no faith in City Hall's ability to make the streets safe, they took one more step in the direction they'd been heading over the past couple of decades—they retreated. They removed the radio when they parked their car and took it with them into the steel-doored, barred-windowed fortresses they called home. One more piece of ground surrendered. They'd pulled all their belongings in from the street a generation ago; after having the shrubs repeatedly dug up and carted off from the fronts of their apartment houses, they'd stopped planting them, and they'd chained—chained—the trunks of the few larger ones that remained.

Jack was fed up with retreating. He'd had it up to here with retreating. And when one of these creeps got within reach, like this doughy lump of dung, he wanted to stomp him into the earth, leaving nothing but a wet stain on the ground when he was finished. So when he felt that blackness rising, he did a ten count and willed it back down to wherever it lived. There was a thin line here, one he tip-toed along, one he tried to keep from crossing over. Spend too much time on the far side of that line and you became like them.

Jack let out his breath and looked down at the mugger.

He was whining.

"Hey, man! Can't you take a joke? I was only—"

"Drop the knife."

"Sure, sure."

The bare fingers opened, the big blade slipped from the gloved palm and clattered to the earth.

"Okay? I dropped it, okay? Now let me up."

Jack released his arm but kept a foot on his back.

"Empty your pockets."

"Hey, what—?"

Jack increased the pressure of his foot. "Empty them!"

"Okay! Okay!"

The mugger reached back and pulled a ragged cloth wallet from his hip pocket and slid it across the dirt.

"All of them," Jack said. "Everything."

The guy rolled left and right, pulled a couple of crumpled wads of bills from the front pockets, and dumped them by the wallet.

"You a cop?"

"You wish."

Jack squatted beside him and went through the small pile. About a hundred in cash, half a dozen credit cards, a gold high school ring. The wallet held a couple of twenties, three singles, and no ID.

"I see you've been busy tonight," Jack said.

"Early bird catches the worm."

"No, pal. You're the worm. This all you got?"

"Aw, you ain't gonna rip me off, are ya? I need that money."

"Your jones needs that money."

Actually, the Little League needed that money.

Every year about this time the kids from the local teams that played here in Central Park would come knocking on doors looking for donations for uniforms and equipment. Jack had made it a tradition over the past five or six years to help them out by taking up nocturnal collections in the Park. Repairman Jack's Annual Park-a-thon. Seemed only fair that the slimeballs who prowled the Park at night should make donations to the kids who used it during the day. At least that was the way Jack saw it.

"Let me see those hands," Jack said. He'd noticed an increasingly lower class of mugger over the past few years. Like this guy. Nothing on his fingers but a cheap pewter skull-faced pinky ring with red glass eyes. "How come no gold?" Jack pulled down the back of his collar. "No chains? You're pathetic, you know that? Where's your sense of style?"

"I'm a working man," the guy said, rolling a little and looking up at Jack. "No frills."

"Yeah. What do you work at?"

"This!"

The guy lunged for his knife, grabbed the handle, and stabbed up at Jack's groin. Jack rolled away to his left and kicked him in the face as he lunged again. The guy went down and Jack was on him again with his arm pulled up behind him and his sneaker back in its former spot on his back.

"We've already played this scene once," Jack said through his teeth as the blackness rose again.

"Hey, listen!" the guy said into the dirt. "You can have the dough!"

"No kidding."

"Just let me—"

He screamed as Jack shifted his foot into the rear of his shoulder and kicked down while he gave the arm a sharp twist. The shoulder dislocated with a muffled pop.

The Rambo knife dropped from suddenly limp fingers. Jack kicked it away and released the arm. As the guy retched and writhed in the dirt, Jack scooped up the cash and rings. He emptied the wallet and dropped it onto the guy's back, then headed for the lights.

Jack debated whether to troll for a third mugger or call it a night. He mentally calculated that he had donations of about three hundred or so in cash and maybe an equal amount in pawnable gold. He'd set the goal of this year's Park-a-thon at twelve hundred dollars. Used to be he could clear an easy thousand on a single night on his annual spring troll but it didn't look like he was going to make that this year. Which meant he'd have to come back tomorrow night and bag a couple more. And exhort them to give. Give till it hurts.

As he was coming up the slope to Central Park West in the mid-Sixties, he saw an elderly gent dressed in an expensive-looking blue blazer and gray slacks trudging with a cane along the Park side of the street.

And about a dozen feet to Jack's left, a skinny guy in dirty Levis and a frayed Hawaiian shirt burst from the bushes at a dead run. At first Jack thought he was running from someone, but noticed that he never glanced behind him. Which meant he was running toward something rather than away. He realized the guy was making a beeline for the old man.

Jack paused a second. The smart part of him said to turn and walk back down the slope. It hated when he got involved in things like this, and reminded him of other times he'd played good Samaritan and landed in hot water. Besides, the area here was too open, too exposed. If Jack got involved he'd could be mistaken for the Hawaiian shirt's partner, a description would start circulating, and life would get more complicated than it was already. Butt out.

Sure. Sit back while this galloping glob of Park scum bowled the old guy over, kicked him a few times, grabbed his wallet, then high-tailed it back into the brush. Jack wasn't sure he could stand by and let something like that happen right in front of him. That would be another kind of retreat.

Besides, he was feeling kind of mean tonight.

Jack spurted into a dash of his own toward the old gent. No way he was going to beat the aloha guy with the lead he had, but he could get there right after him and maybe disable him before he did any real damage. Nothing elaborate. Hit him in the back with both feet, break a few ribs and give his spine a whiplash he'd remember the rest of his life. Make sure Aloha was down to stay, then keep right on sprinting across Central Park West and into yuppyville.

Aloha was closing with his target, arms stretched out for the big shove, when the old guy stepped aside and stuck out his cane. Aloha went down on his belly and skidded face first along the sidewalk, screaming curses all the way. When he stopped his slide, he began to roll to his feet. But the old guy was there, holding the bottom end of his cane in a two-handed grip like a golf club. He didn't yell "Fore!" as he swung the heavy metal handle around in a smooth wide arc. Jack heard the crack when it landed against the side of Aloha's skull. The mugger stiffened, then flopped back like a sack of flour.

Jack stopped dead and stared, then he began to laugh. He pumped a fist in the old guy's direction.

"Yes!"

Looked like he wasn't the only one in town who'd had enough.

Still smiling, Jack broke into an easy jog, intending to give the old dude a wide berth on his way by. The fellow eyed him as he neared.

"No worry," Jack said, raising his empty palms, "I'm on your side."

"I know that, Jack."

Jack nearly tripped as he stuttered to a halt and turned. The old guy had his cane by the handle again; he stepped over Aloha like he was so much refuse and strolled Jack's way as if nothing had happened. The guy had style.

"Why'd you call me Jack?"

The old man came abreast of him and stopped. Gray hair, a wrinkled face, pale eyes.

"You are Repairman Jack, aren't you?"

Jack scrutinized the man. Even though stooped, he was still taller than Jack. A big guy. Old, but big. And a complete stranger. Jack didn't like being recognized. It put him on edge. But there was something appealing about that half smile playing about the old dude's lips.

"Do I know you?"

"No. My name's Veilleur, by the way." He offered his hand. "And I've wanted to meet you for some time now. I came out here tonight to remedy that."

Jack shook his hand, baffled. "How did you—?"

"Let's walk, shall we?"

They crossed Central Park West and headed toward Columbus Avenue.

"Want to tell me what's going on?"

"The end of life as we know it."

"Swell." A nut. "Look, it was nice meeting you but I've got a few errands I've got to run and—"

"I'm not crazy."

"I'm sure you're not, but—"

"And I'd think that after your run-in with the rakoshi you'd be more open-minded than most about occurrences that the average person would write off immediately as madness."

As memories of that summer of death and horror swirled about him, Jack stopped and grabbed Veilleur's arm.

"Wait a sec. Wait a sec. What do you know about rakoshi? And how do you know?"

"I'm sensitive to certain things. I sensed their arrival. But I was more acutely aware of the necklaces worn by Mr. Bahkti and his sister."

Jack felt slightly numb. The only other people who knew about the rakoshi and the necklaces were the two most important people in the world to Jack—Gia and Vicki. And one other.

"Did Kolabati send you?"

"No. I wish I knew where she was. You see, it is Kolabati and those necklaces that I wish to discuss with you." He smiled at Jack. "Still have to run off on those errands?"

"They can wait," Jack said. "You like beer?"

"I love it."

"Come on. I know a place where we can talk."