Free Repairman Jack [03]-Conspiracies by F. Paul Wilson

returned to flipping through the Little Orphan Annie book. Jack had picked up the Fantagraphics collection of all the strips from 1935 along with the Daddy Warbucks lamp. He'd bought it for Vicky but Gia immediately had taken possession of it.
    Blond and beautiful, she sat across from him at a tiny table far from the big street-front windows. The remains of three lunches lay scattered and mostly eaten before them. Vicky, Gia's daughter, had had a hamburger; Gia, complaining that all the salads had meat, had finally settled for some vegetarian chili. Jack had ordered the Harley Hog Special—a mass of pulled pork stuffed into a roll.
    "What is pulled pork, anyway?" Gia said, looking askance at the scraps left on his plate.
    "It's the other white meat."
    "Cooking a pig sounds nasty enough, but why pull it?"
    "I think they cook it on the bone, then grab handfuls and—"
    "Stop right there. Please. Oh, and look," she said, folding her paper napkin and reaching across the table, "your Band-Aid is oozing a little."
    He let her dab at his throat.
    "That must have been some shaving cut. What were you using—a machete?"
    "Just careless."
    Jack was still unsettled and annoyed at himself for getting hurt. He'd picked up some Band-Aids at a drugstore on Seventh Avenue, and cleaned the wound in the bathroom of a McDonald's. It wasn't deep, but it had needed two Band-Aids to cover it.
    He hadn't actually said it was a shaving cut—he hated lying to Gia—but he hadn't corrected her when she arrived at that conclusion. She tended to overreact when he got hurt, going on about how easily it could have been so much worse, how he could have been killed. Sometimes that led to an argument.
    A shaving cut was good.
    "There!" she said, balling up the napkin. "All cleaned up."
    "I had a rakoshi dream last night," he told her.
    They usually avoided talking about the horrific episode last summer that had ended in the deaths of Vicky's two aunts and damn near Vicky herself. But he needed to share this, and Gia was one of the four other people who knew about the creatures.
    She looked up at him. "Did you? I'm sorry. I think I've finally stopped having them. But every once in a while Vicky wakes up with the horrors. Was I in it?"
    "No."
    "Good." She shuddered. "I don't ever want to see one of those things again, not even in someone else's dream."
    "Don't worry. You won't. That I can promise you."
    Gia smiled and went back to flipping through the Annie book; Jack looked around for Vicky. The pig-tailed eight-year-old reason they were in this particular place was over by the window, gyrating on a coin-fueled motorcycle ride. A delicate warmth suffused Jack as he watched her pretend she was racing it down some imaginary road. Vicky was the closest he might ever come to having a daughter, and he loved her like his own. Eight years old and no secrets to keep from her mom, just the moment and learning something new every day. That was the life.
    "Think she'll grow up to be a biker chick?"
    "That's always been my dream for her," Gia said without looking up from the book.
    Jack had promised Vicky a lunch out during her grammar school's spring vacation week, and she'd chosen the Harley Davidson Cafe. Vicky liked all the wheels and chrome; Jack loved the fact that only tourists came here, reducing to near zip his chances of running into someone he knew. Gia had come along as chaperone, to make sure the two of them didn't get into trouble. None of them was here for the food, which was mostly suitable for staving off hunger until the next meal. But as far as Jack was concerned, having the two ladies in his life along transformed any place into Cirque 2000.
    "These are really good," Gia said, spending about two seconds per page on the Little Orphan Annie book.
    "You can't be reading that fast," Jack said.
    "No, I mean the art."
    "The art? They're drawings."
    "Yes, but what he does with just black ink in those little white boxes." She was nodding admiringly. "His