Twisted (8 page)

Thirty feet.

Shadow Man was wearing running shoes. Gaia could see them now. The off-white soles flashed at her under the flapping hem of his long coat. She found something comforting about the shoes. At least it was nice to know he wasn't running so fast in
penny loafers.

Twenty feet.

A policewoman shouted at Gaia as she dashed across Fourteenth Street and headed south. She didn't bother to stop. If the policewoman wanted Gaia, she had better start running.

Now Gaia realized the man had brought her right back to Washington Square Park, and they ran through shadows cast by huge oaks and ghost white birch.

Ten feet.

Gaia could almost reach out and touch the flapping coat. Almost. The air in her throat tasted like fire, and there were little sparks of white light dancing in her eyes. In another ten seconds
this psycho was hers.

Then somebody screamed.

Gaia thought for a second it was her. She was hurting badly enough to scream.

Then the sound came again from somewhere off to her right.

Five feet.

All Gaia had to do was keep running and she could catch the black coat. But what if she caught him and he turned out to be innocent?
Really fast, but innocent.

What if the Gentleman was killing someone else in the park right that second? Gaia tried to get her oxygen-starved brain to make a decision. Another scream.

Oh, shit,” she wheezed through her breathing.

Gaia turned right, leaving Black Coat to run on into the night, and dashed toward the commotion.

It didn't take her ten seconds to find who was doing the screaming. Standing under a pool of light was a young girl in blue jeans and a black sweater. Tugging on her purse strap was a potbellied, long-haired guy with a tangled brown-and-gray beard that went halfway down his chest. The girl had both hands clamped to her purse and her feet well planted.
She was putting everything she had into it.
The guy might outweigh her by a good fifty pounds, but she was giving him a fight.

“Let go!” the girl cried.

The guy laughed. “Come on, baby. I need it worse than you.”

Gaia didn't think either one of them saw her coming. By then she was running at roughly the speed of a 747 pulling out of JFK. Gaia didn't slow a bit as she tucked in her head, lowered a shoulder, and smashed into Brown Beard.

The impact was enough to make Gaia fall to her bruised knee and
send fresh neon bolts of pain ripping through her body.
The bearded guy was knocked at least ten feet. He lay facedown on the grass with one hand stretched out over his head and the other trapped under his body. For just a second Gaia flashed back to the chalk outline on the ground. Hand up, legs spread.

She shook her aching head to clear away some of the fog and climbed to her feet.
It seemed like a long way up.

“Y-You . . .,” Gaia started, then took a breath and tried again. “You okay?” she asked the girl.

The girl nodded. Gaia couldn't see her clearly, but she was very tall and very slim. Delicate looking. And she was definitely young. Way too young to be walking around the park alone at night. Of course, who was Gaia to talk?

“Who are you?” the girl asked.

“I—” Gaia couldn't think of a good answer. If she even had a name, she had misplaced it somewhere.
Somewhere back along the long minutes and longer miles of her run. Gaia turned around and staggered back the way she had come.

“Where are you going?” the girl called.

Gaia didn't bother to answer. There wasn't enough air to talk and run.

She put up her arms, drew in a deep breath, and started back to the spot where she had last seen the shadow man.

Gaia made maybe three whole steps before the ground jumped up and gave her a hard slap in the face.

You'd
think that I wouldn't have a very vivid imagination. I'm a science geek, right? I play chess. It's all analytical. It's all about numbers, proofs, strategies.

Solid definitions.

There's no room for imagination.

But sometimes I don't even believe what my mind can come up with. There are things living in my head I'm sure any shrink worth his cheap spiral notepad would kill to delve into.

My imagination is especially vivid when it comes to Gaia Moore.

And not in the way you think. I'm not a total pervert. Although . . . Well, yes, the brain does travel in those circles, but I'm a guy. You have to forgive it.

I'm talking about the sick side of my mind. The dark side. The side a lot of people probably have but don't talk about. And
ever since this afternoon, that side has been transmitting Gaia pictures. Not pleasant Gaia pictures.

Pictures of Gaia dead. Pictures of Gaia cut. Pictures of Gaia bleeding and crying and gasping and sputtering. They only last for seconds at a time before I drive them away. But in those seconds they scare me to death. They arrest every functioning part of my body and take the breath out of me.

Why?

Because they could become reality.

Ed stared at the handset in confusion. “Who is this?” the connection “Sam Moon,” said the voice. “I'm trying to reach Ed.”

ED HIT THE KEYS ON HIS COMPUTER
so hard, the whole desk started shaking. The words on the word processor screen glowed back at him.

LOSER. LOSER.


LOSER. BIG LOSER. ALL THOUGHT AND NO ACTION MAKES ED ONE GIANT LOSER. LOSER. LOSER.


Somewhere, three screens' worth of LOSERs away, there was a letter that started with “Dear Gaia.” It was a letter that explained everything. It was a letter that put into words all the things Ed wished he could have said that morning.

LOSER, Ed typed one last time, moving his fingers slowly across the keys and
Striking each one as if he meant to knock a letter from the keyboard.

L. O. S. E. R.


He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed at his temples. It turned out that losing, or at least not getting the woman you loved, caused a massive headache. Three aspirins had gone down his throat and
Ed still felt like his skull was going to
bust wide open.
He almost wished it would.

With a sigh he moved the mouse up to the corner of his document and clicked the close button.

Save changes? the machine asked.

Ed clicked on the No button and watched as both his letter to Gaia and
his three-page tribute to self-pity
blinked into nothing.

He took in a deep breath, turned his back to the computer, and rolled over to the heap of books lying on his bed.

He had braved the snarling stone lions and endless wheelchair ramps at the main public library to come up with this stack. Six books, all of them about serial killers and murderers. Ed wondered if the librarians would add his name to some list they kept behind the counter. Serial killer junkies.
Murder geeks.
Or maybe Hannibal Lecter wanna-bes.

It was possible they even suspected that he was the Gentleman. But Ed doubted that. Sometimes being in a wheelchair was a weird kind of being invisible—
no one ever looked at the wheel chair guy as a threat.

Ed grabbed the first book off the stack and flipped open the pages to the introduction. Staring back at him was a wild face framed by wilder hair. It was a woodcut picture of a killer from the Middle Ages—a man who had killed dozens of children near a small village in France. In the picture the man held a child
in one hand.
Not all of a child.
Part of the body had already been eaten.

A quick flip of the page and Ed was facing newspaper sketches of a shadowy Jack the Ripper stalking the streets of Whitechapel in a cape and top hat. Across from the sketch was a diagram of a woman who had been dissected more completely than Ed's frog in freshman biology.

Another page and there was a black-and-white photo from the 1930s. This time the killer was a calm-looking man from Germany who had
ground some of his neighbors into sausages.
Flip.

He was looking into the
fantastically mad
eyes of Charles Manson.

On the next was the dumpy face of John Wayne Gacey.

Flip. Jeffrey Dahmer.

Flip. A middle-aged Russian guy with thick-framed glasses. Maybe he had killed fifty. Maybe it was a hundred.
No one knew for sure.

Ed tried to read more of the text around the pictures, but he was having a hard time concentrating. And for an admittedly frivolous reason, when he considered the subject matter in front of him.

Gaia a had a date
. Ed's chance had been there. All he'd had to do was roll up to Gaia, open his mouth, and tell her how he felt. She had been right there.
Right there.

Of course, she could have shot him down. Absolutely
would
have shot him down in flames. A girl like Gaia. Ed had to be crazy to think he could ever be more than friends with Gaia.
He should be glad she even noticed him.

Ed looked down at his book and stared into the face of the Russian killer. A world that could put Ed in a wheelchair and have Gaia making a date exactly at the wrong moment seemed like just the kind of world that could produce a serial killer. They were probably
as common as cockroaches.

The phone rang.

Ed stared at it with mixed emotions. It was a little early, but he had no doubt that it was Gaia on the other end. Usually, he called her, but since she was going to be out patrolling, and he was going to be fact-finding, she'd said she'd call him when she got in.

On most nights Ed looked forward to the late-night Gaia call. She was never exactly a blabbermouth, but compared to the way she was at school,
Gaia was far more open on the phone.
The phone calls were the only times when she really spilled her thoughts. Ed loved it. He just wasn't sure he could take it right now. Not after everything that had happened. He didn't think he could sit there and
make happy noises
while Gaia talked about her upcoming date. The thought made his blood curdle.

Who was this date-worthy guy; anyway? Where had he come from? And what gave him the right to ask out Perfection Personified?

The phone rang again. If Ed didn't answer, he wouldn't have to hear about the mystery guy. He wouldn't have to kick himself for being such a gutless wonder.

Of course, if he stopped answering, Gaia might never call again.

Ed scrambled for the phone.

“Hey,” he said as he lifted the receiver, “I know why they call him the Gentleman.”

“Is this Ed Fargo?” said a voice on the other end of the line. A guy's voice.

Ed stared at the handset in confusion. “Who is this?”

“Sam Moon,” said the voice. “I'm trying to reach Ed.”

Sam Moon.

Ed knew who Sam was. They had even spoken a time or two, but that certainly didn't make them friends. Back in the days when Ed had traveled sans wheelchair, Heather had been his girlfriend.
Now She was Sam's.

“What do you want?” Ed's voice came out a little rougher than he had intended.

“It's about Gaia Moore,” said Sam.

Wonderful. Did Sam have a date with her, too? Maybe she'd lined up the football team for the weekend.
Open wound. Salt at the ready.
“What about Gaia?”

“It's just that . . . well—”

Ed wasn't breathing. “Well, what?”

“You're her friend, right? I've seen you together.”

“I'm her friend,” Ed agreed. And that was probably all he was ever going to be. Once again tiredness and anger got the better of him. Still, it was nice that Sam had noticed. Maybe he was even
jealous
. “If you're looking for tips on asking her out, you better talk to someone else because—”

“I'm not calling about anything like that,” Sam said quickly.

“Then what do you want?”

Sam took a deep breath.

“I want you to help me save Gaia's life.”

“ARE YOU AWAKE?”

Gaia looked up. Or tried to look up. All she could see was dark and slightly less dark. Neither one of them seemed to form any shape that made sense.

“Don't worry,” said a voice from the not so dark. A girl's voice. “I'm going to go call an ambulance.”

“Uhh,” Gaia grunted. She struggled to move her rigid jaw muscles. “Nuhhh.”

No. Don't do that.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

What Gaia wanted was for
this disembodied Voice
to go away and leave her alone so that she could recover.

It was the most irritating thing—the real price of stressing her body in ways that no human being was built to take. For a few seconds, at most a few minutes, Gaia could push herself way past the limits of normal human strength and endurance, but when that time limit was up,
Gaia's body went on strike.
Her muscles stopped talking to her brain, and her body stopped moving. It would pass soon enough, but until it did, Gaia was absolutely helpless.

It was a feeling she didn't cherish.

“Look,” said the voice. “I don't know what's wrong with you, but I don't think you're dying.”

Great diagnosis, Doc.

“So I'm going to sit here with you and make sure you're okay.” Gaia felt a warm body next to her arm. It didn't feel all bad, but she didn't want it there. “If you're not, I guess I better call an ambulance.”

“Gooo way,” Gaia managed to whisper. Gradually her muscles were waking up again, but she was still embarrassingly weak. She could probably get up; she just didn't want to try it in front of this girl.