The Blonde

6:48 a.m.

Once you come to terms with the idea that you’re a monster, it’s easier to function. Your physical self is more forgiving of abuse, willing to strain against its own humanity. Because there is no humanity under all of that flesh, after all. Which was how Kowalski was able to drag himself up from the floor and try to piece himself back into some semblance of a man. It’s what monsters did.

He’d looked around at the debris of forgotten childhood.

The best operations, Kowalski’d reminded himself, supplied their own tools.

First, he’d found a needle and thread from a Kenner mini sewing machine kit. The gashes on his body could be covered with bandages and clothes. But his face? His face needed work. Sanitary? Hardly. But what was that to a monster?

The metal supports from the shelves? Leg brace, Road War-nor-style. Sort the broken bones out later. Long as they would support his weight.

A little water from the employee sink, he was even able to smooth down his clothes, get some of the shattered glass and dust and splinters and wrinkles out of them. Wash away the crusted blood from around the purple-and-pink-threaded sutures.

By the time he left the abandoned toy warehouse forty-five minutes later, the monster was reasonably human. He checked his image in a plate-glass window of another store. Pale, but no visible blood. People saw blood, they got upset. Otherwise, they could deal with anything. Even his stitched-up face and rusty leg brace.

A few questions of a passerby got him what he wanted: Yeah, strange guy, howling, taken away in cuffs.

His boy Jack.

Alive, at least up until the point he was arrested.

Nearest police district was the Fifteenth; he caught a cab up there, flashed the Homeland Security badge, just about damn near dazzled Detective Hugh Sarkissian with his embossed foil with the holographic flying eagles, which distracted him from the purple stitches and rusty leg brace. Kowalski told him that Jack Eisley was part of an investigation he was running. No, he wasn’t a terrorist, just a freaked-out informant.

“Who’s still alive, right?” Kowalski asked.

“Yeah,” Sarkissian told him. “But we’re ready to let him sweat it out a little.”

Kowalski took a chance. “He begged you not to leave him alone, didn’t he?”

Sarkissian’s face went wide. “Yeah. What the fuck is that about, anyway?”

Kowalski rolled his eyes in a “You don’t even want to know, buddy” kind of way, then gestured to the room. “You mind?”

Which got him in the door of the interrogation room at precisely 6:48 A.M.

Not a second too soon, from the look on Jack’s face.

He was hurting.