Better to continue. Better to keep this half-life, this half-future, time without end.
“Families are overrated,” Silas said. They look at you with betrayal and loss when you do what was right.
But the boy didn’t know that yet. He didn’t know a lot.
“You ever get scared?” the boy asked.
“Of what?” Silas asked. Then gave the standard answer. “They can’t kill you. They can’t harm you. You just move from place to place, doing your job. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
The boy grunted, sighed, and looked out the window.
Silas knew what he had asked, and hadn’t answered it. Of course he got scared. All the time. And not of dying-even though he still wasn’t sure what happened to the souls he freed. He wasn’t scared of that, or of the people he occasionally faced down, the drug addicts with their knives, the gangsters with their guns, the wannabe outlaws with blood all over their hands.
No, the boy had asked about the one thing to be afraid of, the one thing they couldn’t change.
Was he scared of being alone? Of remaining alone, for the rest of his days? Was he scared of being unknown and nearly invisible, having no ties and no dreams?
It was too late to be scared of that.
He’d lived it. He lived it every single day.
The house was one of those square adobe things that filled Vegas. It was probably pink in the sunlight. In the half-light that passed for nighttime in this perpetually alive city, it looked gray and foreboding.
The bars on the windows-standard in this neighborhood-didn’t help.
Places like this always astounded him. They seemed so normal, so incorruptible, just another building on another street, like all the other buildings on all the other streets. Sometimes he got to go into those buildings. Very few of them were different from what he expected. Oh, the art changed or the furniture. The smells differed-sometimes unwashed diapers, sometimes perfume, sometimes the heavy scent of meals eaten long ago-but the rest remained the same: the television in the main room, the kitchen with its square table (sometimes decorated with flowers, sometimes nothing but trash), the double bed in the second bedroom down the hall, the one with its own shower and toilet. The room across from the main bathroom was sometimes an office, sometimes a den, sometimes a child’s bedroom. If it was a child’s bedroom, there were pictures on the wall, studio portraits from the local mall, done up in cheap frames, showing the passing years. The pictures were never straight, and always dusty, except for the most recent, hung with pride in the only remaining empty space.
He had a hunch this house would have none of those things. If anything, it would have an overly neat interior. The television would be in the kitchen or the bedroom or both. The front room would have a sofa set designed for looks, not for comfort. And one of the rooms would be blocked off, maybe even marked private, and in it, he would find (if he looked) trophies of a kind that made even his cast-iron stomach turn.
These houses had no attic. Most didn’t have a basement. So the scene would be the garage. The car would be parked outside of it, blocking the door, and the neighbors would assume that the garage was simply a workspace-not that far off, if the truth be told.
He’d been to places like this before. More times than he wanted to think about, especially in the smaller communities out in the desert, the communities that had no names, or once had a name and did no longer. The communities sometimes made up of cheap trailers and empty storefronts, with a whorehouse a few miles off the main highway, and a casino in the center of town, a casino so old it made the one that the boy found him in look like it had been built just the week before.
He hated these jobs. He wasn’t sure what made him come with the boy. A moment of compassion? The prospect of yet another long Christmas Eve with nothing to punctuate it except the bong-bong of nearby slots?
He couldn’t go to church anymore. It didn’t feel right, with as many lives as he had taken. He couldn’t go to church or listen to the singing or look at the families and wonder which of them he’d be standing beside in thirty years.
Maybe he belonged here more than the boy did. Maybe he belonged here more than anyone else.
They parked a block away, not because anyone would see their car-if asked, hours later, the neighbors would deny seeing anything to do with Silas or the boy. Maybe they never saw, maybe their memories vanished. Silas had never been clear on that either.
As they got out, Silas asked, “What do you use?”
The boy reached into the breast pocket. For a moment, Silas thought he’d remove the IPod, and Silas wasn’t sure how a device that used headphones would work. Then the boy removed a harmonica-expensive, the kind sold at high-end music stores.
“You play that before all this?” Silas asked.
The boy nodded. “They got me a better one, though.”
Silas’ banjo had been all his own. They’d let him take it, and nothing else. The banjo, the clothes he wore that night, his hat.
He had different clothes now. He never wore a hat. But his banjo was the same as it had always been-new and pure with a sound that he still loved.
It was in the trunk. He doubted it could get stolen, but he took precautions just in case.
He couldn’t bring it on this job. This wasn’t his job. He’d learned the hard way that the banjo didn’t work except in assigned cases. When he’d wanted to help, to put someone out of their misery, to step in where another death dealer had failed, he couldn’t. He could only watch, like normal people did, and hope that things got better, even though he knew it wouldn’t.
The boy clutched the harmonica in his right hand. The dry desert air was cold. Silas could see his breath. The tourists down on the Strip, with their short skirts and short sleeves, probably felt betrayed by the normal winter chill. He wished he were there with them, instead of walking through this quiet neighborhood, filled with dark houses, dirt-ridden yards, and silence.
So much silence. You’d think there’d be at least one barking dog.
When they reached the house, the boy headed to the garage, just like Silas expected. A car was parked on the road-a 1980s sedan that looked like it had seen better days. In the driveway, a brand-new van with tinted windows, custom-made for bad deeds.
In spite of himself, Silas shuddered.
The boy stopped outside and steeled himself, then he looked at Silas with sadness in his eyes. Silas nodded. The boy extended a hand-Silas couldn’t get in without the boy’s momentary magic-and then they were inside, near the stench of old gasoline, urine, and fear.
The kids sat in a dimly lit corner, chained together like the slaves on ships in the nineteenth century. The windows were covered with dirty cardboard, the concrete floor was empty except for stains as old as time. It felt bad in here, a recognizable bad, one Silas had encountered before.
The boy was shaking. He wasn’t out of place here, his old wool jacket and his dirty jeans making him a cousin to the kids on the floor. Silas had a momentary flash: they were homeless. Runaways, lost, children without borders, without someone looking for them.
“You’ve been here before,” Silas whispered to the boy, and the boy’s eyes filled with tears.
Been here, negotiated here, moved on here-didn’t quite die, but no longer quite lived-and for who? A group of kids like this one? A group that had somehow escaped, but hadn’t reported what had happened?
Then he felt the chill grow worse. Of course they hadn’t reported it. Who would believe them? A neat homeowner kidnaps a group of homeless kids for his own personal playthings, and the cops believe the kids? Kids who steal and sell drugs and themselves just for survival.