Free The Shadow Men by Christopher Golden; Tim Lebbon Page A

umbrella people passing by. He pointed at the sky. “Someone up there?”
    Trix laughed uneasily. “The way I understand it, you’re asking Boston.”
    “Boston?”
    She nodded. “The city. Yeah.”
    Jim let his shoulders sag. “Oh, Jesus, Trix, you can’t believe that. You wasted all this time—”
    “When we could have been doing what?” she snapped, her gaze intense. “Look at me, Jim. There’s nothing normal about this. We can’t hire a private detective or something. Another search of your apartment isn’t going to turn up shit. So please, just … let me try.”
    “Who even told you about this?”
    Trix took a deep breath. “My grandmother. I’ll explain later. But for now … I need your help.”
    He let out a breath and nodded, trying to think of a next step, something he should be doing to try to find his wife and daughter in a world where they had apparently never existed. “All right,” he said, a great void opening up within him. Whatever hope he still had had begun to fade.
    “You have to ask for help.”
    Jim tried not to pay attention to the people passing around them, to faces halfway hidden beneath umbrellas, to conversations and cell phones and a burst of laughter from half a block away.
    He closed his eyes. “Please,” he whispered, his heart breaking all over again as he surrendered to the truth, that he had no chance of finding them himself. “I’ve got to find them. I can’t live without them.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were true. He would never be able to survive in a world where his two reasons for living had simply vanished, where all that he loved had been taken away. Deleted.
    “Okay,” Trix said, squeezing his hand. “Let’s go.”
    Jim let her lead him. “Where?”
    She looked up at the street signs on the corner. “To dinner.”
    “Are you serious?” he asked. “I couldn’t eat anything right now.”
    Trix let go of his hand and he saw his own heartbreak reflected in her eyes. “What about a drink? I’m not screwing around, Jim. There’s a place we need to go.”
    Jim exhaled. They should be out searching, but where would they even begin to look? “And over a drink, you’ll tell me what this is all about?” he asked.
    “I swear,” Trix said.
    “Then lead the way. Maybe a whiskey will steady my nerves.”
* * *
    As it turned out, the whiskey didn’t help.
    Other than telling him where they were going, Trix had been resolutely silent on their short drive to the North End. Jim had found a parking spot across the street from Mike’s Pastry, and they’d walked past the strange spectacle of a trio of fiftyish Italian men sitting in lawn chairs in front of a small shop as though nothing had changed in the century since the North End had been the heart of Boston’s Italian-immigrant community.
    These days, the people descended from those immigrants couldn’t afford to live in the trendy neighborhood, but nearly every storefront was an Italian restaurant. The North End was a dining mecca for tourists and locals alike, and the sidewalks were always thronged with people, the streets jammed with traffic. And yet those men in their lawn chairs seemed unmoved by the changes in the neighborhood. They were either Mafia or Mafia-connected, but even the Mob had been watered down tremendously over the years, and they were the only ones who didn’t seem to realize it.
    They had passed by a dozen more modern restaurants, walking along Hanover Street away from the worst of the crowd. On a block of three-story apartment houses, tucked between a small Laundromat and an even smaller Italian grocery, was a restaurant called Abruzzi’s that seemed to make no effort to draw the attention of passersby. There was no sandwich board advertising specials on the sidewalk, no awning, no valet parking—just a menu taped to the inside of the tinted front window.
    Inside, Abruzzi’s seemed stuck in the 1970s, with red vinyl booths and Sinatra