Free Nightjack by Tom Piccirilli

told her. “We’ll eat out here.”
    She did as he said, wandering into the neon glare in a kind of puzzled daze. He wondered why none of the other psychiatrists at the hospital had seen how close to cracking she actually was.
    She returned with the food and Pia squealed with delight and everyone ate in silence, the car growing more and more crowded by the second until Pace had to lean his head out the window to breathe. There were kids in the backseat singing and playing with their french fries, old men having a tough time eating the hamburger because of their poorly-fitted dentures.
    Pace ate little and finished quickly, the way Jack used to do on stakeout in Brooklyn keeping an eye on the Ganooch and his people. No liquids so you didn’t have to take a piss break. He waited and watched while the others finished their food.
    It took seventy minutes before Kaltzas’s men arrived. Pace saw the white Jaguar slowly turn into the rest stop. It wasn’t exactly the most inconspicuous car, but Kaltzas seemed willing to trade guile for grandeur. Perhaps impression meant everything. The Jag circled the area and spotted the Chevy almost immediately. They parked in a far-off corner, engine humming. The windows were tinted black.
    “You all stay here,” Pace said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    “You can’t, Will.” Dr. Brandt touched him on the chest, smoothing her hand across him in a lover’s intimate gesture. His scars began to heat. What had he done with this woman?
    “Hold on,” Faust said. “It might be Kaltzas himself. There might be several armed men in that car. Do you want help?”
    “No,” Pace said, his fear and hatred taking on a thousand forms within him. “I’ve got plenty.”
     

eight
     
    Sometimes you just stepped right up.
    Pace walked across the parking lot and knocked on the driver’s window of the Jag. He backed off a couple of feet and stood there with his arms crossed over his chest.
    Mist rose up from the lowland grass edging the rest stop. The storm would be blowing in from the west soon. It wanted him. He could feel the desire on the wind. He could taste salt on his lips and caught a flash of Jane again. The two of them stepping across the sand, somewhere out here on the east end, down at one of the private beaches. She’d take a mouthful of wine and kiss him, passing the wine to him. He hated the taste but remembered laughing.
    The engine of the Jag hummed quietly.
    Maybe this cat had all day to sit around playing games, but Pace felt the need to get on with it. He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, held his hands open in a gesture of geniality. He got in close and tapped his fingers on the hood.
    Still nothing happened.
    You could take a lot, but you really hated when they fucking ignored you.
    “Okay,” he said, smiling, and came around the front of the car.
    Pace took out the small screwdriver and touched it to the center of the driver’s window. He hardly had to apply any pressure at all before the glass shattered.
    The door opened.
    Out came one hell of an ugly bastard. Short bowed legs, thick stubby arms, wild tangle of beard, and a barrel chest. Coarse black hair twisted across his huge head that protruded like a chunk of rock breaking from the shallows. He had a large nose with permanently flared nostrils, giving him a brutish, bullish appearance. The Minotaur.
    He gave off an artificial milieu of refinement. It was something he’d worked at for a long time but still didn’t come naturally to him. He moved slowly, the way wealthy snobs often did, as if they refused to lower themselves to the same constraints as the rest of the world. He looked like someone who might spend the day listening to Brahms, visiting art galleries, dining on quails’ eggs before kicking in the door of a retirement home and strangling an old lady in her bed.
    The Minotaur, coming at you.
    Wearing a three thousand-dollar suit and a huge diamond stickpin that caught a flare of headlights and