Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
He seemed to come back to attention at the contact, and as he looked at her, he frowned. “You’re back.”
V frowned and cut in quick, “Yeah. We are. Did you see us before?”
“You were here the other night. I came in as you were leaving.”
“What did we look like?”
“Like you.” The old guy seemed confused. “And you were taking things and putting them in the van out back. Two vans.”
Patting his own chest, V said, “We were dressed in black, yes? Did we say anything to you?”
The old man frowned and then weaved on his feet. As he put a hand to his frontal lobe and winced, there was a whole lot of “ding-ding-ding, we have a winner” in V’s head.
Vampires, he thought. And they’d scrubbed his memories.
“Okay,” Payne said, “thank you. You’ve been really helpful. But who can we call for you?”
“My son, Ernie Junior,” the owner mumbled. “He gave me this… to give to people…”
An arthritic hand reached into the pocket of his loose pants and he took out a laminated card. Payne handed the thing to V. Then she just stared at the man.
“I’m really sorry,” she whispered.
V snagged his Samsung and dialed the number. And sometime between the second ring and when a guy answered, he realized what his sister was thinking of doing.
Opening his mouth, he intended to tell her no. Then he looked on the wall behind the cash register, above the displays of those blood pressure cuffs and the blood sugar testers. The lineup of photographs started black-and-white, ended in faded colors, and the lot of it was a documentation of the aging process at work. The constant was the store, while the owner progressed through the eras of his life. Most of the images had been taken out in front, and there were other people in them, men in suits who looked like politicians, women in hats and dresses and cat-eye glasses.
The first and the last pictures were with a woman standing at his side, and like him, she went from somewhere in her early twenties to something north of seventy.
“—hello?” a voice said over V’s phone. “Who’s there?”
At the prompting, V refocused on the man in vivo, the elderly, confused old guy who had sundowner syndrome, and whose dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever it was took him back to his true North, this store.
“I’ve got your father,” V murmured. “He’s at the pharmacy.”
“Oh, God, not again—” There was a muffling, and then the son said to someone in the background, likely his wife, given the female voice, “Dad’s out again… no, I know—I know, we need to get him into a home—”
“We’ll stay with him here,” V cut in. “Until you come.”
The man put the phone back into place at his mouth. “Sorry—thanks. Hey, who is this?”
“Just a passerby. My sister and I saw the back door open and the lights on.”
“He does this a lot. He needs to be in a memory care unit.”
“Like I said, we’ll wait here and keep an eye on him.” God, why was he volunteering to stay in this drama? “Unless you want us to call the cops or something.”
“I am the cops. Local sheriff. Anyway, I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“We got ’im.”
“Thank you—what did you say your name was?”
“Vinnie Sanguerossa.” As V ended the call, he glanced over at his sister. “You shouldn’t be fucking around with this. I’m telling you.”
When she glanced over at him, he was pretty sure the look on her face was what people saw on his own when he was telling them to butt-the-fuck-out.
“Mr. McTierney?” she said as she refocused on the human.
“Yes, honey?”
“You’re going to be a mess,” V muttered as he checked the time. “You do this and it costs you.”
“Close your eyes for me, will you?” Payne stepped in closer. “That’s right. This isn’t going to hurt, I promise.”
“Not him, it ain’t.” V took out a hand-rolled and put it between his front teeth. “I’ll be outside while you’re saving the world. ’Cuz I’m not allowed to fucking smoke in here.”
Walking through the partially open rear door, he took a deep breath of the night and then lit up. As he leaned back against the brick building, he looked across a farm field and then along the rear entries to the other stores in the row.
Behind him, in the pharmacy, Payne was talking to the old man, murmuring so quietly V could only hear the rhythm of the syllables, and then there was a gasp, a sharp inhale. Hard to know which one of them it came from—
A flare of light pierced out between the door and the jamb, and he braced himself for what was coming next. Three… two… one…
The release of energy fully opened the door, the nuclear-bright illumination turning the empty parking lot to daylight for a split second. And then the panel closed with a clap.