Those to be Forgiven

Published: 1 Feb 2018

How did you feel about the boy?

Mike?

(…)

How do you mean?

You were taking him along with you. Protecting him. Harbouring a… murderer?

Mike’s not a murderer. He saved my life. He saved my life from a man who had spent the better part of his own abusing children. Are you seriously going to try and cast Mike a villain?

No. Of course not. But you were running out of state, transporting a minor… a fugitive at that… Would it be fair to say that your actions were not entirely honourable?

Fuck you.

You already admitted that you found him attractive…

Fuck you!

That you masturbated in the shower after sharing a kiss with him…

FUCK YOU!

(…)

(…)

Well perhaps it’s best that we don’t dwell on that for now.

(…)

So you returned to New York with Pickman and the boy in tow.

Yeah.

And?

And what? There’s nothing for you to twist there.

I’m not looking to twist anything Mr Quaid.

Do you notice when you become combative or is it just a reflex for you?

I’m not sure what you mean.

That’s, what? The third or fourth time you tried to make me sound like a pervert.

Mr Quaid! You’ve freely admitted to me yourself…

I’ve admitted nothing beyond what this case was doing to my mental state. I made a few poor choices but I never followed through on them.

Mr Quaid…

Maybe it’s me that you’re now trying to cast as the villain of this story.

I’m not trying to…

You’ve been edging that way for a while. Tell me. And be goddamn honest for once. Are you trying to make me the scapegoat here?

That is genuinely not the case….

Then why do you keep following this line?

It’s the backbone of the case Mr Quaid.

(…)

You were working a case that involved a missing child; a peadophile ring, two known child pornographers, a ranch that specialised in the training of missing boys and a secretive cult that had been known, to us at least, as having existed in this country since the day the Mayflower anchored itself at Plymouth Rock. You had been thrown into something that was… let’s say: beyond your ken. And while working that case, as you have admitted, you made some poor decisions. No one is judging you for those decisions Mr Quaid. All I wish to understand, for the record, for the organization that I represent, is if those decisions sprung from the case and any… outside interference in your psyche, or whether there is perhaps some deficiency in your character.

Deficiency in my character?

I appreciate your honesty Mr Quaid. I really do. And I would ask that you please not let this little bump in the road affect how honest you continue to be… We all have demons, some that we are born with, some that we acquire over the course of our lives through the choices that we make… We can shout down some of them most of the time. But sometimes, in periods of confusion or emotional turmoil, we find ourselves calling out the better angels of our nature in error… allowing our demons to run amok.

(…)

Do you understand what I’m saying?

Yeah… I do.

So you see that ‘the only dog I have in this race’, as you put it earlier, is trying to get to the heart of the matter? To see how the case was affecting you. Emotionally, spiritually and physically.

(…)

When you returned to New York…

We had gotten back into the city a little after one in the afternoon. I had Pickman drop me near my office and asked that he keep Mike with him. The kid wasn’t too happy about that.

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“Because I’ve got some work that I need to do,” I told him as I unloaded the film cans, tapes and dvd’s from the trunk of Pickman’s Pinto.

“But…”

“Mike. Pickman will look after you. I’ll come and see you later on tonight after ten. I’ll bring a couple of Pizza’s over or something.”

“Anything you need me to do?” Pickman asked me as he handed me the last of the 8mm film canisters and Ives’s laptop.

“Actually there is.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a hundred and fifty in bills. “Go shopping with Mike. Get him some new clothes.”

Pickman took the money and pocketed it.

“Then go over to O’Tooles and speak to Barney. Find out what he knows about The Dutchman. Anything that’ll help us get a fix on him so that we can be done with this Christiansands bullshit as soon as possible. If you’ve got time; go and see what your horticulturist turned up too. The more we know about those seeds the better.”

“You want me to take the kid?”

“I’m not a kid.” Mike chipped in from beside us.

I put my hand on his shoulder and smiled at him. “You fancy helping Pickman doing a little detective work for me?”

His face switched from surly to a smile: “I’d rather be helping you.”

“Not today. Help Pickman for now and we’ll work out what’s happening from there.”

After they left I made my way up the stairs to my office, lugging my briefcase, the films and Ives’s laptop with me.

The first thing I did was to go online and check the news out of NC. The cops had managed to connect the dots and placed the nine boys that had turned up at St. Agatha’s Hospital in Kinston with the trailer park. The boys hadn’t spoken about what happened; they didn’t mention either Pickman or myself but the signs of abuse and wear on their bodies had been made public record… There wasn’t a man in the county now that didn’t know exactly what Johnny Ives did for his kicks. Cops in Goldsboro had also found Ives’s truck where we had left it parked at the disused factory across from Penny’s Diner. Keeping an eye on the story as it developed was going to be important, if only to make sure that Pickman and I weren’t going to get dragged back into it.

For the first time in four days I went back to my apartment. The door was closed but unlocked. Marko Keena didn’t lie to me. His men who had searched it looking for Pickman hadn’t turned it over. It looked as I had left it. Before doing anything else I went to the window and took a few photos on my cell phone of the street below. Keena had said that he had someone outside keeping an eye on the place.

I showered, changed my clothes and then went back to the window took a few more shots.

I made myself something to eat: some pasta and tomato sauce and sat down in front of the television. Washed the dishes, dried them and put them away and then I took yet another couple of pictures of the street.

I’d been in the apartment for a little over two hours before I left, locking the door and heading over to a photo store in Midtown; where I picked up a second hand 8mm film projector for a hundred bucks and a VHS cassette player for thirty and took them over to the office.

I sat there, threading the first reel through the spools (I had to look online about how to do it) and steadied my nerve for the films that I was setting myself up to watch.

Something struck me while I started up the projector… I considered my mother’s reverence to the family photo albums and the old cassette tapes that store large portions of my childhood and any number of family vacations… You see people have this notion of photographs and video footage as some form of… immortality. That you’ve a moment captured of someone’s life and preserved it on film for posterity. But that’s not what films are. Not at all. There’s no everlasting soul deep within those images. When you think about it, when you really think about it: All you have is a shadow of someone’s former self; arrested and compelled to perform the same actions for all the time that this planet has left – all you have is people condemned to replicate the same act on film again and again and again… All you really have… is ghosts…

I went through the 8mm films first. I’m not going to relive what I saw. It’s all in the files…. On the two dozen 8mm film loops were three scenes each. That’s seventy-two clips. I didn’t watch them all. I was just looking for Donny. Out of all of them he featured in nineteen. Two of the canisters were devoted entirely to scenes of him. In each one, just like a ghost forced to perform the same devastating acts again and again, that it did in life, young Donny Baldwin was coerced into sex acts with a number of boys and men. I recorded the physical descriptions of the boys that were featured with him. The men were careful never to show their faces, either wearing a balaclava or filmed only from the neck down. And yeah. Johnny Ives appeared in five of them… Young Johnny I mean… He enjoyed it a lot more than Donny did.

Some were filmed inside; bathrooms and lounges – a few in a bedroom that looked like the one in the photos sent to the brother. Some were filmed by the pool, in front of that mosaic patterned wall – including the full scene of the clip that had been sent to Thomas’s office on the USB drive. Others were filmed on a beach and others still in a location that I had seen in the Cine Boys films, the one that looked liked a bedroom in a trailer.

I watched that poor kid get raped and abused nineteen times… All over the course of what must have been two or three years. And yeah… he hadn’t seemed to have aged at all.

Once I was satisfied that he didn’t feature in any more of the loops on the 8mm films, I started in on the VHS cassettes. These were later, mid to late eighties… You could tell from the film posters that covered the walls; the music and change in fashions: pastels to neons… And I’ll be damned if what I saw in them didn’t set my head spinning… Donny Baldwin… still thirteen years-old… still getting molested and raped by men… I mean… Mike had told me… Ives had told me… I just didn’t believe it. I mean, I couldn’t. I refused to accept it as even a possibility. A boy slow to move through puberty over the course of a few years I could just about figure, but those VHS tapes? Even when I was watching it with my own eyes: Donny Baldwin, thirteen years-old on a bed beneath the golden bat symbol from the eighty-nine Batman film, reluctantly sucking the fat erect cock of a now seventeen or eighteen year-old Johnny Ives…

I just… I mean it was impossible. Right?

Donny appeared on those VHS cassettes in a further eleven scenes. I fast forwarded through the rest but made count of another thirty scenes featuring Ives with other boys… Again, you’ll find cross referencing in my report.

Lastly I went through the dvds… The surprising thing about those is that they were all collections of the Cine Boys film loops. The ones that Sisk and Crops made and sold commercially. But here was the full collection. All sixty seven loops, digitised from the original 8mm films. This must have been what Roland was looking to pay for… I doubt that there was another person on the planet that had the full collection. Despite my initial reluctance to get involved with Roland I found myself beginning to wonder how much these dvd’s would fetch.

For a good couple of minutes with a glass of Strathisla in my hand I tried to justify it to myself… I could maybe make enough money to get a better apartment. Maybe even move David and I out of The City and away from any comeback from Christiansands… But like I said… that only lasted a couple of minutes. A general sense of human decency won out in the end, I wasn’t going to contribute to the problem. I did consider that I might be able to use the films to my advantage however…

As I was about to start in on Ives’s laptop I noticed the time. It was a little after eight. Much later than I had thought and I still hadn’t run a proper search on Crops and Sisk… I decided that that would have to wait until the the morning.

After stashing the films, tapes, dvds and laptop in the safe under my desk, I took the subway back to my apartment where I took another couple of photos of the street from my window and showered for the second time that day. It was a metaphorical act and I knew it. Washing those films away… Cleaning those ghosts from my skin… I took another couple photos more and left.

While I waited for three pizza’s to be made, a block away from Pickman’s safehouse, I called David:

“What happened? You didn’t answer last night.”

“Yeah… I’m sorry about that. I had my phone on silent. Didn’t look at it until it was too late to call you back..”

I didn’t want to tell him about the trip to Goldsboro with Pickman. I didn’t want to lie to him either. But it was better to be evasive rather than have him worried. A better reason for being evasive was that hearing his voice over the phone brought back visions of my kissing Mike the previous night; Visions and a tight knot in my chest.

“How’s the job?” I asked trying to shift the spotlight of conversation, trying to put my mind anywhere but that motel room.

“They can’t reach an agreement. The Union reps are rightly kicking up a stink and the company hasn’t got the balls to go against them… But it should only be a day or two or more.”

“Seems weird that they haven’t sent you back home considering how long this has been dragging out.”

“They tried the day after you told me not to come back.” David’s voice trailed a little. “But I asked to stick around…”

Listening to his voice made me want to hold him tighter than I had ever held him before. But there weren’t any other options: for his sake he had to stay away. Who am I kidding? It was for my sake that he had to stay away. The thought of David getting hurt because of me… It wasn’t worth thinking about for how heartsick it made me feel.

“Ramsay?”

“Yeah?”

“Everything is going to be alright isn’t it?”

I couldn’t answer him. Instead finding myself staring out of the window of the pizzeria at a young couple walking hand in hand along the street.

“Have you told your sister that you might be seeing her?”

“Oh God no! If she knew I was coming she’d roll out the red carpet and hire a marching band!”

“She only goes overboard because she’s excited to see you.”

“I know…” Silence down the phone. Just our breathing. “I miss you Ramsay. I miss you so much. I don’t care what trouble Pickman’s got you into. I just want to see you. I want to hold my husband.”

“David?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

I wanted to tell him more. To explain to him all the reasons that it was best that he steer clear of The City – that he steer clear of me… Somewhere in me though was the thought that if I did see him, that if I could lay my eyes on my husband then perhaps I would stop thinking some of the thoughts that had been eating away at the edges of my mind. The thoughts about Donny that had plagued my dreams, the thoughts about Mike that had found anchor in the physical world.

“Won’t be long now. I promise.” Whether he needed to hear it more than I needed to say it I couldn’t attest to.

We said our goodbyes just as the boxes of pizza landed on the counter.

Arriving at the safehouse I found Mike and Pickman playing scrabble on the coffee table. They looked homely and happy and it was a nice scene. But I won’t deny that there was a pang of jealousy. It disappeared when Mike turned and saw me enter, immediately dropping the game to stand and call my name. The kid looked good in his new clothes; a red plaid lumberjack shirt and pair of jeans; less like a boy and more like the young man that he was.

He took the Pizza’s from my hands and placed them on the counter of Pickman’s kitchenette before throwing his arms around me and pressing his face into my chest. Despite wanting to I didn’t hug him back, just tapped his shoulders and wished for a release.

As Pickman pulled plates out from the cabinet on the wall I asked him: “How productive was your day?”

“Semi. The kid took forever to choose new clothes.”

“Do you like them?” Mike asked giving me a twirl.

“You look very handsome.”

He beamed at me and I wished that I had chosen other words.

“What about Barney?” I asked turning back to Pickman.

“As far as Barney knows The Dutchman just appeared out of nowhere a week and a half ago. He walked into O’Tooles on his own, ordered a beer that he didn’t drink, and just asked straight off the bat if Barney knew anyone who could connect him with Christian Christiansands.”

“That still doesn’t make much sense to me.” I pulled a slice of the pepperoni pizza from the box and tossed it to a plate. “The way Christiansands talked, it sounded like he and The Dutchman have a history. Wouldn’t he know how to contact him?”

“Depends…” Thought Pickman as he stuffed a folded slice of three cheese into his mouth. “If he only knows him from the time between Chicago and New York maybe they’re not exactly penpals so The Dutchman didn’t know how to reach him.”

“Perhaps…” I walked over to the fridge and pulled out two beers, popped the caps and handed one to Pickman before taking a swig of my own. “But any guy who walks into The City with the muscle and the hardware that you said was backing him up… with the nerve to take out a bunch of Christiansands men… he knows what he’s doing. I just don’t understand why he needed you.”

“A message.” Mike looked up from between us with a mouthful of pepperoni pizza. “He wanted to send a message.”

“How do you mean?” I hadn’t really realised that he’d been listening in.

“When Johnny wanted to say something without technically saying anything he’d have someone else deliver it?”

Pickman and I both squinted at the kid not really catching the drift.

“Say this kid… Daniel… had turned a trick in his trailer and the trick had given him a little extra cash. Like a tip. And Johnny gets wind of it. Rather than beating on Daniel, because Daniel is a good looking kid and makes good money, Johnny instead beats on another kid, who wasn’t making the money that Daniel was making and accuses him of him doing what Daniel had done. This kid then goes to Daniel and out of fear, Daniel gives Johnny the tip.”

I thought about that. There was certain amount of sense to what he was saying. But the difference between some poor kid, terrified for his life at the hands of Johnny Ives, and Christian Christiansands was akin to the difference in heat generated between a lit match and a burning sun. I couldn’t accept that anyone with even the faintest notion of who Christiansands was, would for a moment believe that he would bow to such intimidation.

“That works if Christiansands is employed by The Dutchman…” Pickman following his own train of thought.

“What?”

“Think about it. Christiansands disappears for approximately a decade after the Chicago incident and resurfaces suddenly with enough money and muscle to become the biggest player in The City. Someone had to be bankrolling that.”

“Christian would be making some serious bank in his role as The City’s top dog…”

“And if you were receiving even a portion of that you wouldn’t want to completely turn over the applecart would you? You’d maybe toss a few but not enough to lose you your income.”

“So you think employer rather than rival?”

“Makes a certain amount of sense. Especially if Christiansands cut ties with The Dutchman and The Dutchman wants not only the seeds but also Christian back in his employ.” The more I thought about the more this theory of Pickman’s managed to make both more and less sense.

Pickman reached into his pocket and pulled out another business card: “Barney gave me this.”

It was the same as the card that The Dutchman had handed to Pickman at Red Hook. Just a name: Daan Dieprink, that symbol embossed on the top right corner and the telephone number on the back.

“We never checked out that cell number?” I pointed out, wiping my fingers on a paper napkin before turning the card over. “Did Barney say he if he called it?”

“Only to arrange the initial meeting with me.”

“You think Christian called it?”

“Would he? I mean sure, if he wanted The Dutchman to know that he was bothered by what happened at Red Hook. But he wants us to find him independently. So i’d say that it’s unlikely.”

I nodded.

“You think we should try it?”

“I can call it if you want!” I think Mike was looking to help somehow. He’d just escaped life at the whim of one mad man; I didn’t want him involved with another.

“Let’s see what Keena’s man turns up first.”

“He made contact with you yet?”

“Not yet.” I finished off my second slice of pizza and decided that I’d had enough. “What about your horticulturist?”

Pickman yawned: “Nope. Nothing special about the seeds as far as he can tell. Common or garden marijuana seeds. Plant them grow weed. Smoke the weed get high. He said that he’d be able to tell us more with a live plant.”

“Can he tell if the seeds will grow male or female?”

“No. That’s not a thing. Big ‘ol myth. Even if seeds have been ‘feminized’ you can’t really tell what sex it’s going to be until it starts growing.”

“So Christian’s farmers grow that seed over here and they all turn out male. But in its natural habitat the plant grows both. Christian’s not interested in the weed itself just the seed, which he can only get from the females, and if he already has seed then he wants more of it. Much more of it.”

“He also said that the male plant is smokeable. Which isn’t a thing.”

“How do you mean?”

“Males don’t have the THC content. You can maybe get a little light headed for a couple of minutes but you can do the same thing by standing on your head.”

“He said that they were ‘surprisingly strong’.”

“Maybe. I’d need to smoke one to find out. But maybe the maybe… I just about reckon that Christiansands places more importance on them than they actually deserve.”

“Christian and The Dutchman? No. There’s something to this.”

Seeing that we’d finished what we were going to of the Pizza’s, Pickman tossed our plates into the sink and moved what remained into the one box, leaving it on the counter.

“Tomorrow, do some more digging.”

“For The Dutchman or the weed?”

“Both. I’ve got to go see an old lady about a book and I think that your friend Roland Burgess needs another visit.”

“Make an appointment.” Pickman said yawning again. “He doesn’t like drop-ins.”

“I don’t have time to wait around on his calendar freeing up.”

“Whatever. I’m tired.” Pickman yawned once more and stretched for effect. “You going to take the kid with you?”

“I was hoping Mike could stay here with you.”

“Fine.” Pickman really didn’t care. “But I get the bed. The kid can have the couch.”

“Can’t I stay with you?” Mike had moved in real close and I took an involuntary step back. “It’s for the best that you stay with Pickman. My apartment has eyes on it and I don’t want you getting mixed up in even more craziness. I do want to ask you a couple of questions though. If you’re not too tired?”

“No! I’m fine. I can stay up.”

Pickman looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I hated that look. It was the same one he had given that morning when he saw Mike in bed with me. Those suspicions that he had regarding the content of my character weren’t going anywhere.

“Well whatever you two are going to do, I’m going to sleep.” Pickman walked over to his bedroom door keeping that eyebrow up. “Just don’t make too much noise.”

As I grabbed another beer from the refrigerator I took a can of Coke for Mike and we moved over to the sofa. It was only a few minutes before the gentle whirring of Pickman’s wave machine started up.

“So what did you want to ask?”

“How have you been doing?”

“How do you mean?”

“With everything. How have you been feeling.”

“About Johnny?” He watched for me to nod.

“It only happened yesterday. Nobody expects you to be all dancing and singing.”

After a moment of fiddling with the ring pull on his can of Coke, Mike started speaking, his eyes trained on his fidgeting fingers. “Last night when I woke up in the motel. I had dreamed that he was chasing me through the woods. Johnny I mean… The knife still through his throat and a wet gurgling noise from his mouth instead of his voice. It wasn’t just Johnny though… when I ran, scratching my skin on branches and brambles, I heard the singing voice… and I saw The Hurdy Gurdy Man in a tree.” He went quiet while I listened, finally lifting his head to look me in the eyes. “That’s when I woke up. I saw you in the bed across from me. You looked peaceful. You looked safe. I hope you don’t mind that I…”

“No. I don’t mind.” I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. He blushed. “Do you want to tell me about The Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

“I don’t know much.”

“Tell me what you do know.”

“He comes once a month. Always with the others.”

“What others?”

“The men in hoods.” He looked back down at his hands circling the can.

“Are these the men who were in the cult with Ives?”

Mike nodded, silent.

“What do they do?”

“Ritual stuff. I didn’t really see much. I wasn’t good looking enough for them to want to keep young like Rus and Filippo.”

“You’re plenty good looking.” As soon as the words left my mouth I regretted admitting that to him. Watching his cheeks flush red, as he returned his gaze to my face at the compliment, made me return the blush in kind. I coughed, sipped at my beer and moved the conversation on. “Who are Rus and Filippo?”

“Two of the boys from the trailers. Filippo went to the hospital.”

“And how old are they really?”

“Rus was eleven but he used to say that he was really twenty-something. Filipo’s fourteen. He’s only been at the trailer park a couple of years so maybe sixteen I guess.”

There was still that mental block. The inability to truly believe what he was telling me. Despite the fact that I had seen, only earlier that day, footage on the 8mm film loops and cassette tapes of Donny at thirteen in a year that would have seen him be twenty-five.

“Rus wasn’t still at the trailer park?”

Mike shook his head.

“What happened to him Mike?”

“Johnny sold him. A man who comes by every six months or so. Buys a new boy. We never see them again after that.”

My right hand was squeezing so hard on the bottle of beer that I’m surprised I didn’t break it in my fist: “The men in the hoods. The Hurdy Gurdy Man and Johnny. You said that your saw them perform these… rituals.”

“A few times.”

“What can you tell me about them?”

“It’s like I said. They pick one of the other kids… the men all chant and stuff. Saying things like Johnny was saying. In that language. They bathe him in the kiddy pool and use some funny smelling oil on his body, makes him all shiny. Once they get to their place they’ll tie him to a table.”

“This isn’t in the trailer park?”

“In the woods. They walk the boys into the woods.”

“So how did you see if you weren’t at one of these ceremonies?”

“I followed them. Johnny thought he’d locked all the trailers but he’d left mine open. He didn’t mean to but he was… he was with me before they came.”

“With you?”

Mike lowered his head and closed his eyes looking close to tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Mike.”

“Weren’t you that did it. You wouldn’t though would you? You wouldn’t even if it was offered to you like I did?” He looked back to me again. “You’re as good a man as I ever met.”

I wanted to take the compliment because I wanted what Mike thought of me to be true. There was something about this kid and my desire to live up to the version of me that he had built for himself. Even if I was finding that more and more difficult…

“So I followed him. Watched them wash and then oil this kid they called Will. He was maybe twelve. They oiled up Filipo too. Both were naked. Will was tied to this stone table out in the woods while they had Filipo sit on a big old chair carved into a tree. It was like a throne of something. They gave them both a couple of pills. To keep them hard I think. Then they chanted and they sang and eventually out of the woods came The Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

“Out of the woods? He didn’t visit the trailer park?”

“I never saw him there no.”

“So you think he was in there waiting.”

“I think maybe he lived in the woods. Way he looked all covered in mud and bits of twigs and moss and stuff. Like he was born of it you know? His skin was like bark and his face long with moss for a beard, all sprinkled with lichen so it kinda glowed like silver. His eyes were wrong. Tiny and one up and one down you know? He didn’t look human. Not rightly.”

I wondered how these things must look to a kid Mike’s age; an age where superstitions are common and belief in supernatural things comes easy. A man dressed a certain way among more men, hooded and chanting in some wicked tongue during the dead of night would certainly make it easy for his mind to accept what he was seeing. “Do you think that you might have misremembered his appearance somehow?”

“You don’t believe me do you? You think I’m lying?”

“Mike I didn’t say…”

“You think that I’m making things up but I’m not. I swear I’m not. I seen it. I seen them and I seen him and I seen what he did to Will. What they made him do to himself. It’s not right. It’s not right what they did!”

I put the beer down and pulled Mike into me holding him tight as he sobbed on my shoulder while I tried to calm him. “It’s alright…. It’s alright Mike I believe you.”

I wasn’t going to push him. There was a morbid desire in me to know more. What they did to those kids in the woods but based on what he had just told me along with what he had said before… I could fill in the blanks as much as I needed to.

“So you think that they did the same to the kid that I’m looking for? To Donny Baldwin?”

Mike nodded as he pulled himself straight and wiped his eyes. “If Johnny wasn’t lying to you… then yeah. I’d say so…”

There comes a point when you have to look at the evidence that’s presented to you and despite how unlikely, or in this case fantastical, that evidence might seem you have to allow yourself to accept and believe in it. What Mike was telling me along with the footage of Donny Baldwin seemingly unaged… I couldn’t just dismiss it. No matter how impossible it seemed.

“Have you ever heard of the name TiCK-ToCK?”

Mike thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Like a clock?”

“I think so. I don’t have much more to go on than the name.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t hear Ives or any of the others mention that name? Even in passing?”

Mike shook his head.

After asking Mike to continue helping Pickman the next day I told him that he needed to get himself some sleep. But promised that I’d see him the next evening. He asked me to stay with him. To wait with him in the living room of Pickman’s safehouse until he fell asleep. So I did. I watched him ready himself for bedding down and sat on the chair next to the couch with just the light of street lamps illuminating us through the window.

I watched him wrap himself in a blanket and lay his head down on the couch cushions and look up across to me in the chair. “Goodnight Ramsay.”

“Goodnight Mike.”

To Be Continued…

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