This outlook was reinforced when the aborigine reported that he had, in fact, laid eyes on Libby Hatch: she’d appeared very briefly just after I left, to flag down a passing milk wagon. She hadn’t looked any too pleased about being up and attending to what were pretty obviously baby Ana’s needs at that early hour, but the fact that she’d headed back inside seemed to indicate that, at least for the moment, she wasn’t contemplating any drastic move. Not that there was any real reason for her to yet: she knew that it would take time for the Doctor and the others to catch up with her, and that even when they did they’d have to relate what’d happened to the cops and then convince somebody at headquarters on Mulberry Street to raid the Dusters’ headquarters: not the kind of thing any cop or squad of cops in their right minds were likely to undertake without one hell of a lot of persuading. But just knowing where the woman and the baby were was cause for some satisfaction.
Less encouraging was the fact that Betty came back out of the Dusters’ in just fifteen minutes, looking confused, disappointed—and not a little concerned. I whistled to her from our high perch, then directed her to meet me around the corner, at the mouth of the trucking alley. There she told me a story what was peculiar, to say the least: Libby Hatch had arrived at the Dusters’ at just past three that morning, and had immediately locked herself away in Goo Goo Knox’s chamber with Ana Linares. Kat, true to her word to Mr. Moore, had right away gone upstairs, and talked her way into Knox’s room by asking Goo Goo if she could be any help with the baby. But Libby’d remembered only too well that Kat was a friend of mine, and she’d flown into a rage, saying that Kat was a spy whose real purpose was to steal Ana away and bring the law after her. Now, Goo Goo would ordinarily have solved this problem by having Kat taken over to the river, killed, and thrown in; but at that point Ding Dong—as much, I figured, out of a desire to save face in the gang as out of any true concern for Kat—had stepped in, saying that nobody was going to do away with one of his girls without his say-so. Knox and Ding Dong had then gotten into a hell of a scrape, one what’d apparently been very entertaining to all those slummers we’d seen. At first Kat’d joined in the fight, trying to defend Ding Dong; but after about half an hour Libby herself, with that unpredictability what we’d, all come to know so well (and what usually didn’t indicate anything good), had put a stop to the battle by saying that she’d be satisfied if Kat would just get out of the joint. This Kat’d done, removing herself exactly as far as the nearest corner. I figured this meant that Kat’d intended to keep right on watching things from outside the place, so’s she’d be able to tell whichever of our party came back to the city first (she’d have been able to figure out that we wouldn’t be far behind Libby) where our adversary’d got to, if she’d left the building, and whether or not she still had the baby with her.
But then, for some reason what nobody inside the dive could figure, Kat’d suddenly disappeared, not long before El Niño and I’d arrived on the scene. Betty’d tried to find out if anybody had any idea where she might’ve gone; she even went so far as to have a conversation with Ding Dong, who, while nursing his bruises and cuts, said he didn’t much know nor care where “the little hellcat” was. Kat’s sudden disappearance was the most disturbing part of the story, being as, though she was at least safely out of Libby Hatch’s direct reach, there was every chance Knox’d found out that she was lurking around and had dispatched somebody to take care of her. On top of that, if Kat’d been safe, there were only a few joints where she probably would’ve gone, and Frankie’s was at the top of that very short list. Obviously, she hadn’t turned up there. On the other hand, it was August, and though the hot, heavy sky had been threatening a thunderstorm all morning, it hadn’t broken yet—Kat could’ve been hiding out in any of the city’s parks or the dozens of other outdoor havens what were available to kids on the run during the warm months. So, since things were quiet inside the Dusters’ for the time being, I decided to assume that Kat was okay and lying low somewhere: I’d make a quick round of some of the more obvious hiding spots downtown, and then check with those acquaintances of mine—including Hickie the Hun—who might’ve already seen her, or could reasonably be expected to catch sight of her during the day.
I gave Betty the telephone number of the Doctor’s house before letting her go back to Frankie’s, and made her promise to call and keep calling if Kat should turn up. Then I went back up onto the rooftop to tell El Niño what my plan was. I knew he’d want to stay right where he was and keep watching the Dusters’, just in case Libby did make a move, so I also gave him the Doctor’s telephone number, though I warned him that I wasn’t likely to show up at the house for at least another hour or two. But in the event that Libby did get out and get moving, I told him to stay close to her and to keep trying to report. Then, figuring that the aborigine was broke, I handed over half of the cash what Mr. Moore’d given me, and finally started out on my search.
The first and most nerve-racking part of this job was a quick trip over to the Hudson waterfront to see if anybody’d noticed a struggle going on that morning or if any bodies’d been spotted in the water. I talked to a few gangs of longshoremen as I worked my way down as far as the Cunard pier, but none of them’d heard of any trouble. I even ran into my old pal Nosy, who was, as usual, poking around in the midst of all the early morning debarking and unloading what was going on, and he likewise said he hadn’t seen Kat nor heard about any violence on the waterfront. This news, like the information I’d gotten from Betty, had the effect of both reassuring me and making me even more nervous about where Kat could’ve gone or what she might be doing. More than anything eke, one question stuck in my head: Why had Libby Hatch been willing to let Kat walk away, instead of insisting that she share the fate what’d befallen the poor, dumb guard Henry, and maybe Mr. Picton, too? Of all Libby’s many complicated characteristics, mercy didn’t seem one what made an appearance all that often, especially not where her own safety and schemes were concerned. Why had she let Kat go?
Working my way downtown and through my old neighborhood, stopping in at half a dozen other kid dives what weren’t much different from Frankie’s, I continued to find no trace of Kat. Hickie was over at the Fulton Fish Market, cramming a morning swim in before the coming storm unloaded on the city, and he told me that he’d been working a string of houses on the West Side with a collection of our old pals the night before. They hadn’t made their way home ’til early in the morning, and they’d stopped off for a few pails of beer at a dive on Bleecker Street on their way. But he, too, hadn’t seen or heard anything of Kat, a fact what seemed to be cause for hope: if something had happened to her, word would’ve gotten around our circuit pretty fast. But where in the hell was the girl?
Another swing past Frankie’s (where the Italian kid I’d laid out was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen) finally gave me the beginnings of an answer: when Betty’d gotten back from giving me a hand at the Dusters’, she’d found Kat waiting for her. Kat had, it seemed, been feeling very poorly, which was why she’d left off watching the Dusters’ place: a severe pain in her stomach and gut had struck her, a mysterious ailment what neither she nor Betty could identify or ease. On hearing that I was back in town, Kat’d decided to head on up to the Doctor’s house and wait for me, since, as she’d told Betty, I could lay hands on some medicine what was especially useful for the kind of trouble she was in (meaning the Doctor’s supply of paregoric). Betty’d wanted to go with Kat, who was starting to vomit pretty violently by the time she left; but Frankie was still angry at her for leaving that morning, and so Kat’d had to set out on her own, and was probably at Seventeenth Street now.
I ran back over toward City Hall Park to hire a cab, picturing in my mind Kat all huddled up where she’d hidden once before, in among the hedges what ran along the border of the Doctor’s front yard. She’d looked pretty awful then, and what with Betty’s strange report I didn’t expect her to appear much better when I found her this time: her sudden exit from
the Dusters’ probably indicated another lack of burny, from which she was now feeling the effects. We’d have to repeat the treatment what’d helped her the last time around, though it would cost me another lecture from the Doctor; but at least I’d be able to help her once I got her into the house.
I found her just where I’d figured to, balled up like a newborn kitten in among the greenery to the side of the front yard, wearing the dress she always did in summer: an old, light job that showed off the curves what were still forming in her young body. She was asleep, clutching her bag tight to her stomach and breathing in quick little gasps. There were a couple of pools of vomit—really not much more than bile, given that she’d been retching for so long—lying on the ground behind her curled back, and her face was the color of old ashes. Big charcoal-colored circles had formed under her eyes, and as I took her hand I noted that her fingernails were starting to turn a strange and disturbing sort of color, like they’d been stepped on.
Even I could see that she was much sicker than she’d been last time.
As I wiped a few sweat-drenched strands of blond hair out of Kat’s face, I noted that her skin was strangely cool to the touch; and when I tried to get her to wake up, it took a good minute of gently slapping her palms and calling her name to do the job. As soon as she started to come around she grabbed at her gut especially hard, then retched again, bringing up nothing at all this time. Her head swaying as I helped her to sit up, she seemed to have trouble focusing her blue eyes.
“Stevie…” she breathed, falling against my chest. “Oh, God, I’ve got a awful pain in my gut …”
“I know,” I said, trying to pull her up so’s I could get her inside. “Betty told me. How long you been without the burny, Kat?”
She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t but a little. “It ain’t that. I’ve got a whole tin of the stuff, and I been blowing it all morning. This is something else …” As she stood up, the pain in her midsection seemed to ease a little bit, and she looked up to really see my face for the first time. “Well,” she whispered, with a small smile, “I ain’t generally at my best when we see each other, am I?”
I smiled back at her as best I could, and brushed some more hair out of her face. “You’ll be fine. Just got to get you inside and fixed up.”
She tightened her grip on my shirt, looking very worried and maybe a little ashamed. “I tried, Stevie—I told your friend Mr. Moore I’d look out for the kid, and I really did try, but the pain got so bad—”
“It’s okay, Kat,” I said, holding on to her tighter. “You done good—we got somebody else watching the place now. Somebody Libby won’t be able to get away from.”
“Yeah, but will he be able to get away from her, Stevie?” Kat said hoarsely.
“Won’t need to,” I answered. “This mug’s different, Kat—he can match her play for play.”
Nodding and then stumbling a little as I pulled her toward the front door, Kat tried to swallow: an action what appeared to give her a lot of difficulty. “He must be good, then,” she said, coughing some. “‘Cause I’ll tell you, Stevie—that woman is the end of the damned world…”
Taking out my key, I opened the front door and guided Kat into the warm, stale air of the house. Just as soon as we’d reached the bottom of the staircase, she doubled over again, vomiting up some yellow bile and then screaming once in agony. But the shrieking itself seemed to call for more strength than she had, and as she fell out of my arms to sit on one of the stairs she just began to weep quietly.
“Stevie,” she managed to say, as I sat next to her and held her tight, “I know you ain’t supposed to, and I don’t want you to get in no trouble—”
I’d forgotten all about the paregoric. “Right,” I said, leaning her against the stairway wall and then standing up to head for the Doctor’s consulting room. “You wait here, I’ll get the stuff.”
As I tried to move down the hall, I felt her clinging to one of my hands, like if she let go I might never come back. Turning around, I saw tears still streaming down her terribly pale face. She was staring at me in a way what sort of seemed like she’d never really seen me before. “I ain’t never deserved your being so good to me,” she whispered; and something in the words made me rush back to her for a second and hold her as tight as I thought she could stand.
“You pipe down with that,” I said, trying hard to keep my own eyes dry. Maybe it was the long night catching up with me; maybe it was the awful thing what had happened to Mr. Picton; and maybe it was fearful joy at hearing her actually admit to some kind of a deep and pure connection between us at a moment when she was in such desperate pain; whatever the explanation, the thought of losing her just then was the worst thing I could imagine. “You’re gonna be fine,” I went on, drying her face with my sleeve and looking deep into those blue eyes. “We got through this once, didn’t we? And we will again. But this time,” I added with a smile, “after we do, I’m putting you on the damned train myself—and you are getting out of this town.”
She nodded once, then looked down. “Maybe—maybe you’ll come with me, even, hunh?” she said.
Having no idea at all what I was saying, I just whispered, “Yeah. Maybe.”
Looking a little ashamed, Kat mumbled, “I never meant to go back to him, Stevie. But I didn’t hear nothing from my aunt, and I didn’t know what to—”
“Forget that,” I said. “All we gotta worry about right now’s getting you better.”
And then I bolted off into the Doctor’s consulting room to fetch the big bottle of paregoric, what I proceeded to liberally dose Kat with. She didn’t complain at all about the taste, knowing the good effect it’d had on her cramping the last time around; but her problem with swallowing only seemed to be getting worse, and it wasn’t easy for her to get the stuff down. Once she had, though, it appeared to take hold of her pretty quick, easing her pain up enough so that she could stand back up, put one arm around my neck, and start moving up the stairs. But the effect turned out to be temporary: we’d only gotten to the third floor of the house before she doubled over and screamed again, this time in a way what made me afraid to move her much farther. We were just outside the door to the Doctor’s bedroom, and I decided the best thing would be to take her in and get her laid down on his big four-poster bed.
“No!” Kat gasped, as I half carried her along. “No, Stevie, I can’t! It’s his bed, he’ll skin you!”
“Kat,” I answered, laying her out on top of the thin, deep blue spread what covered the bed, “how many times you gotta be wrong about the man before you get it? He ain’t that way.” As her head sank into the Doctor’s big mountain of soft goose-down pillows, I glanced around the room for something to cover her with, eventually catching sight of a comforter covered in green-and-silver Chinese satin what was folded up on a divan by the window. “Here,” I said, spreading the thing over her. “You got to keep warm and let the medicine go to work.”
Even with all her pain, Kat managed to pull the comforter up so’s she could rub the satin against her cheek. “He’s got nice things,” she mumbled. “Genuine satin—hot as the air gets, it still stays so cool…. How come that is, Stevie?”
I crouched down on my knees next to the bed and touched her forehead, smiling. “I don’t know. Them Chinamen got tricks.” She winced once more, and I held up the paregoric bottle. “You wanna see if you can get some more down?”
“Yeah,” she said; but, try as she might, she just couldn’t swallow more than a little of the stuff, and finally she gave up trying. Writhing around with her hands on her stomach, she cried out again, then started to gnash her teeth in a frightful way.
It was beginning to occur to me that this might not be something what was going to pass with a dose of paregoric; and so, telling Kat to try to hold on, I ran into the Doctor’s study and opened his book of addresses and telephone numbers, eventually finding the listing for Dr. Osborne, a good-hearted colleague of the Doctor’s what I knew lived nearb
y, and who’d often done us good turns when somebody in the house was hurt or sick. Racing down to the telephone outside the kitchen, I got hold of an operator and had her connect me; but the maid at Dr. Osborne’s said that he’d gone off to do his rounds at St. Luke’s Hospital and wasn’t expected back for a couple of hours. I told the woman to have him telephone as soon as he returned, and then I went back up to the bedroom again. Breathing a big sigh of a relief when I saw that Kat’s painful spasms seemed to have passed, at least for the moment, I went to kneel by the bed again, and took her cold left hand in both of mine.
She turned her head over and smiled at me. “I heard you down there. Trying to get me a doctor …”
“He’ll come in a little bit,” I answered with a nod. Then I joked quietly, “Figure you can make it that long?”
Kat nodded. “I’ll make it a lot longer than that, Stevie Taggert,” she whispered, still smiling. “You watch.” Glancing around the room, Kat took in a deep, sudden breath. “I ain’t never had a doctor tend to me. And I sure ain’t never had no satin comforter. Feels nice …” Then she lost the smile, and for a minute I got scared that the pain was coming back; but it was only curiosity that filled her face. “Stevie—one thing I never asked you …”