9
"What on Earth is so interesting?"
Jack looked up from his copy of Hank Thompson's Kick. He was propped up in bed by two pillows, reading in a pool of light from a goosenecked lamp attached to the headboard. The rest of the bedroom lay dark around him.
He glanced at Gia where she lay beside him. She'd turned over to face him. Her eyelids were at half mast. She looked ready to drop off any minute.
"Is the light keeping you up?"
"Nothing keeps me up when I get tired, you know that. But what've you got there? You never read in bed."
Jack didn't know how to explain it. He'd returned from Rathburg feeling restless and uneasy. He sensed he was being drawn into something he should avoid, dragged into a place he didn't want to go. Christy Pickering seemed to be at the heart of it. Since talking to her he'd had a priceless book stolen from a stroked-out old man, found a dead body, and witnessed—and foiled—an abduction.
Or was it all coincidence?
Yeah, he'd been told no more coincidences for him, but surely that didn't apply to everything in his life. Coincidences did happen in the normal course of events. He couldn't buy that something was preventing everyday coincidences.
He couldn't see how the loss of the Compendium could be connected to the Pickering problem. But he most certainly saw a connection between the Compendium and the book in his hands: the four-armed stick figure.
Jack had a pretty good idea of how the theft had gone down: the Kicker janitor—they still hadn't found him—had seen the prof at the Xerox machine copying the drawing of the Kicker man. He'd recognized it and decided he wanted it.
Why?
Then again, why not? Judging from today's experience at the bookstore, "mine" and "not-mine" appeared to be concepts either unappreciated or not easily grasped by Kickers—especially when it came to books.
The janitor had been around the museum. One look at the Compendium and he had to know or at least guess it was worth a fortune. Which was why he'd disappeared. Probably trying to fence it now.
The idea of the Compendium in the wrong hands bothered Jack. He didn't know to what uses it could be put, but he had a feeling they weren't all good.
Tomorrow he'd see if he could get the guy's name and do a little tracking on his own. He doubted the cops would tell him—too bad he wasn't Jake Fixx with all those law enforcement contacts. He'd have to look elsewhere. Maybe the museum staff…
But right now he wanted to see if Hank Thompson gave any clue as to how an ancient symbol—of what, he wished he knew—from an equally ancient one-of-a-kind tome had ended up on the cover of his book.
He held it up for Gia.
"I was intending just to skim through it, but the first part of the book is a memoir and I sort of got caught up in this guy's personal story."
Hank Thompson hadn't had it easy growing up. Far from it. Born in Arkansas in poverty to a single mother who died young, his unnamed absentee father would visit him now and again, but never helped him off the foster-home merry-go-round he rode into his teens. Yet Thompson didn't seem to bear him any animus. Seemed to revere him instead.
"How far along are you?"
"He's just coming out of his teens and surprisingly up front about the petty crimes he committed."
Gia yawned. "You think he really committed them or is just looking for street cred?"
"It rings true."
Gia looked at him. "You'd know, I guess."
"Unfortunately, yes."
Thompson's account reminded Jack a little of the time he spent on the street when he first arrived in the city. He'd wanted to stay below the radar, and that meant working off the books for cash and hustling for every buck. He wasn't proud of some of the moves he'd made back then.
Gia yawned again, then lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek.
"Have fun. I'm outta here."
As she rolled over and tugged the blanket up over her head, Jack returned to Kick.
Thompson had just turned nineteen in the story when he started stealing cars in Columbus, Georgia, and driving them into Alabama where he got top dollar from a chop shop in Opelika.
Maybe this was why so many Kickers had criminal records—they identified with Thompson.
He read on…
Then came a major turning point in my life. One bright hot summer day I wheeled a I^exus LS 400 into one of Jesse Ed's bays. The Lexus was still the new kid on the automobile block back then and damn hard to find in the South. This was a primo grab and I was expecting a big payday. What I got instead was trouble. Instead of finding a grinning Jesse Ed waiting with his acetylene torch, I found a gang of Alabama state troopers who'd raided the place about an hour before I got there.
Well, let me tell you, I smoked that Lexus's tires backing out of there and led those troopers on a merry old chase back to the state line. Beat them too. But I ran into a Georgia state cop roadblock where they shotgunned my tires.
I was so royally pissed at getting caught that I guess you could say I went a little bit nuts. It took four of those boys to take me down. And take me down they did. If someone had been around with a video camera, I could have been the white Rodney King.
I woke up the next day battered and bloody and facing not just a local GTA rap, but federal charges for ITSMV. (For those of you who've never been on the wrong side of jail bars, that's grand theft auto and interstate transportation of stolen motor vehicles, respectively.)
Jack had to smile. Yeah, he could see where getting busted simultaneously for both state and federal raps could be a life-changing experience.
He read on with amusement about Thompson's troubles with incompetent—at least according to him—public defenders and drunken judges and crooked prosecuting attorneys, but the chapter's last paragraph stopped him cold.
Well, no question the Lexus was stolen, but they couldn't prove I did the actual stealing, so I skated on the GTA charge. But I couldn't dodge the ITSMV. Not with all those pursuing Alabama smokies as witnesses to my crossing the state line in a stolen car. So I was looking at federal time, and not in some country club either. They had me slated for the Jesup medium security FCI when out of the blue came a reprieve. Oh, not that kind of reprieve. I was still going to do time, but in much cushier surroundings. Don't ask me why, but for some reason the fed-
era! government, in all its wisdom, had decided to ship me to the East Coast, to a place in New York I'd never heard of. I didn "t know it then, hut the Creighton Institute would change my life.
Jack stared at the page in shock. This was too much of a coincidence to be a simple coincidence. It was happening again: Something was pulling his strings.
But the question remained: Why had a nobody car thief like Hank Thompson been shipped across the country to a federal facility?
Jack had a feeling that, whether he wanted to or not, he'd be searching for the answer.