“I did not do it for you,” the gamekeeper told him, and he turned his head and watched as the young mountain lion, the one who’d taken the old one’s cave, poked his whiskers out.“He is kinder than his father,” he said thoughtfully.“But his father was my friend.”
“I was sad to hear of his passing,” Joey said, and the gamekeeper turned toward him, nodding.
“I know.Your friend is being kept in the basement,” he said.“You know the way.”
Joey swallowed and suppressed a shudder.Yes.He knew that basement.
“Indebted,” is what he said.“Should you need one, there’s two motorbikes by the break in the fence, keys in.”
The gamekeeper smiled.“Indebted,” he said, and then he turned back toward the young mountain lion, whom, Joey knew, wouldn’t come out while the three awkward humans dressed in loud armor still lingered.
He nodded toward Crosby and Pearson and took off, going faster now that he didn’t have to hop and skip between cameras.
“The basement?”Crosby asked, barely winded.
Joey grunted.“Lot of blood in that basement.Fucking cold.Locked me in there when I pissed him off.”
“What a fucker,” Crosby replied, parkouring off a rock to stay on Joey’s six.
“Yeah, well, you wanna know the good news about that basement?”Joey did the same off another rock and watched from the corner of his eye as Pearson leapt it like a gazelle.
“Tell me,” she said, less winded than himorCrosby.
“I know the secret way in—and Stevie Carlyle never found it.”
“That’s a good thing,” Crosby said, and then they were quiet as the terrain gotreallyrough.
WHEN JOEYtold the story of his childhood, he usually said, “Stevie shipped me to military school when I was fourteen,” and left it at that.
But there were six long years between the night Joey pissed on his teddy bear to kill the nanny cam and the day he got in the limo for the fuckin’ last time to go to military school.Gideon had known.Gideon had asked him about those years one night, after a windfall of catching Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony in Jersey once they’d finally brought down the Sons of the Blood.It had been late May, about two weeks before they’d hit the club, and they’d been driving back into the city.
“Why do you ask, Gid?”
Joey remembered the expression on Gideon’s lean face, the trouble in his eyes as he’d stared out over the highway, the removable splint still on his wrist from their last adventure.
“Because… because I’ve memorized every intro Bruce ever recorded, and the ones that connect with his father are heartbreaking.But I think that’s because his father, for all his faults and flaws,meantwell, you know?I just… my dad’s doing his best.You know that.Started calling me once a week.Asked for pictures of you.Just… did he even try to connect with you?”
Joey wanted so badly to tell him that yes, yes his father had been a human being, but he opened his mouth to lie and that’s not what came out.
“One of the housekeepers used to feed this stray cat,” Joey said finally.“I liked it.Fed it too.It was filthy.Stevie got home one night, and I’d just bathed the thing, dried it off.It was eating tuna in the kitchen.Fucker saw me there, feeding the cat, and he grabbed both of us—cat by the neck, me by the ear, and threw us in the basement—cat fell and broke its leg on the way down.Dad told me he’d let me out when the fucking cat was dead.Told me I could kill it quick by breaking its neck.”
Gideon’s breath had gone all funny in the dark.Uneven and choppy, like he was injured.
“What did you do?”he whispered.
Joey let out a humorless laugh.“Well, first of all, it wasn’t the flex the old man thought it was.I’d seen the gamekeeper coming in and out of the basement from a pile of rocks.It used to be a servant’s entrance, and then there’d been a cave-in, but the door remained, and if you weren’t too big and wide, you could weasel your way through.”He paused.“I was too short to reach the light,” he said thoughtfully.“One of those ones that hangs by a cord from the ceiling.It took me a long time to pick up the cat, wrap it in my shirt, and make my way outside.”He could smell it.The dankness of earth and mold and of rotting blood.He’d realize later that it wasn’t just the animal’s blood.His father knew every part of this basement—except the hidden door.When people talked about bodies in the basement, Joey knew that some people hadrealbodies in the basement, because that terrible, claustrophobic moment in the dark, he’d tripped over at least two shallow graves.
“What did you do with the cat?”Gideon asked.
“I put it in the housekeeper’s car,” Joey said.“She quit that night, and I figured she would after she watched him throw us in the basement.”He laughed a little.“A few months later, I got a note passed to me in school by a teacher who knew her.It was a picture of the cat, sitting on the porch with her.Leg seemed to be healed okay.”
“That’s real good,” Gideon said, his voice evening out a little.“And you?”
Joey shook his head.“I dunno.Stevie saw me, no shirt, blood all over me, and didn’t even ask about the cat.I think he figured I ate it, or maybe didn’t think about the body rotting down there or something.But he let me out the next day.”Another one of those broken little laughs.“The gamekeeper brought me dinner and a water bottle—to drink from and piss in, he told me.”Then, because it was important; Gideon knew this for some reason.“Wasn’t my last time in the basement.I figured out where the light was, mapped the whole thing in my head.Figured out that the old man didn’t know where the secret door was because it was behind this sort of fake wall, and I kept it a secret.It’s funny,” he said, although it really was the furthest thing from funny.“There’s at least five shallow graves down there, but if the old man had even thought tolookoutside that fucking basement, or improve it, or pay off some schmoes to fix it, he would have figured out he didn’t have to live with his own goddamned bodies in the fucking basement.”
Gideon had shuddered then, visibly.“So no, then.”
“No what?”Joey had forgotten the question.
