a notebook. “On account of we didn’t lose the body, we did a little better with this one. Got a make on him off the fingerprints. Stiff’s name is Benjamin Ratansky. Age fifty-three from Aldrich, Illinois. Funny thing is, according to the make we ran on him, he ain’t dead at all. Computer insists he’s serving out a ten-year sentence for computer fraud at the Taylorville Correctional Center in Taylorville, Illinois.”
Johnny Wareagle was walking the streets of New York. He had no precise destination in mind, no specific route to follow. Anyone watching him might be reminded of how a hunting dog circles the woods in search of the right scent.
His sighting of Earvin Early the previous afternoon had brought him face-to-face with failure, a condition he was not used to and disliked intensely. His Sioux heritage counseled that the entire universe was composed of a single
interconnected and interdependent chain. Some men’s actions are explicitly tied to those of others, and the responsibilities must be shared. In Wareagle’s mind, this meant that his failure to kill Early twenty years before cast him with a measure of the blame for all those the madmen had subsequently killed. And there had been many—of that, Johnny was sure. He could see it in Early’s yellow eyes even from the distance he’d caught his glimpse of him yesterday.
The morning air grew warmer. The city turned alive.
“Hey, giant. Hey, big giant.”
Johnny stopped and gazed downward at the origin of the voice. The speaker was a one-legged vagrant sitting on the pavement with his single leg crossed beneath him. The cool slate supported his shoulders and helped keep his torso from toppling. From around his neck dangled a handwritten sign that read DISABLED VIETNAM VETERAN. He thrust toward Johnny a Styrofoam cup that still smelled of coffee.
His sunken eyes lost their hopelessness for a moment as Wareagle met his gaze.
“You was there, too. I can tell it for sure, you was there, too!”
Wareagle stared intently at the derelict, and the sight taught him much about Earvin Early. Early, after all, had looked almost the same way yesterday. Johnny knew it was not a disguise. The material, anything physical and thus transitory, bore no meaning for the mad giant. Early lived in his mind, and in his mind anything could happen. The experiment he had subjected himself to while in jail had done something to that mind, turned a man into a monster. But it had been Wareagle’s misjudgment that had set the monster free in the north woods of California twenty years ago.
In the thick forest that night, Earvin Early had survived a tumble over a steep ravine with two arrows stuck in him and had lived to begin a new existence. More than anything else, that new existence concerned Wareagle. Indeed,
this hunt wasn’t so much about Early as what he was now a part of—what Johnny had let him become a part of:
Judgment Day …
Early had killed the man who held its secrets, killed the man to protect those secrets. Find him and the next stage of the chain would follow.
Judgment Day had to be stopped.
And Earvin Early was going to help Johnny do it.
Sal Belamo returned the receiver to its cradle and looked disparagingly at Blaine from the chair in the suite’s bedroom. “And you thought a contact of mine coulda been this far off … .”
“Ratansky?”
“According to Illinois prison records, he’s in the Taylorville Correctional Center, all right. Cellblock D, cell twenty-seven. Transferred there from the medium security facility up in Sheridan.”
“Except he’s lying on a slab in the New York City medical examiner’s office. Funny how a dead man can still be serving time in prison.”
“Beats me, boss.”
“I guess I’ll have to go ask him in person.”
“You sure you wanna do this, Indian?”
Wareagle looked up from the small shoulder bag he was packing on the couch in the suite’s living room section. “It is not a question of
Johnny Wareagle was walking the streets of New York. He had no precise destination in mind, no specific route to follow. Anyone watching him might be reminded of how a hunting dog circles the woods in search of the right scent.
His sighting of Earvin Early the previous afternoon had brought him face-to-face with failure, a condition he was not used to and disliked intensely. His Sioux heritage counseled that the entire universe was composed of a single
interconnected and interdependent chain. Some men’s actions are explicitly tied to those of others, and the responsibilities must be shared. In Wareagle’s mind, this meant that his failure to kill Early twenty years before cast him with a measure of the blame for all those the madmen had subsequently killed. And there had been many—of that, Johnny was sure. He could see it in Early’s yellow eyes even from the distance he’d caught his glimpse of him yesterday.
The morning air grew warmer. The city turned alive.
“Hey, giant. Hey, big giant.”
Johnny stopped and gazed downward at the origin of the voice. The speaker was a one-legged vagrant sitting on the pavement with his single leg crossed beneath him. The cool slate supported his shoulders and helped keep his torso from toppling. From around his neck dangled a handwritten sign that read DISABLED VIETNAM VETERAN. He thrust toward Johnny a Styrofoam cup that still smelled of coffee.
His sunken eyes lost their hopelessness for a moment as Wareagle met his gaze.
“You was there, too. I can tell it for sure, you was there, too!”
Wareagle stared intently at the derelict, and the sight taught him much about Earvin Early. Early, after all, had looked almost the same way yesterday. Johnny knew it was not a disguise. The material, anything physical and thus transitory, bore no meaning for the mad giant. Early lived in his mind, and in his mind anything could happen. The experiment he had subjected himself to while in jail had done something to that mind, turned a man into a monster. But it had been Wareagle’s misjudgment that had set the monster free in the north woods of California twenty years ago.
In the thick forest that night, Earvin Early had survived a tumble over a steep ravine with two arrows stuck in him and had lived to begin a new existence. More than anything else, that new existence concerned Wareagle. Indeed,
this hunt wasn’t so much about Early as what he was now a part of—what Johnny had let him become a part of:
Judgment Day …
Early had killed the man who held its secrets, killed the man to protect those secrets. Find him and the next stage of the chain would follow.
Judgment Day had to be stopped.
And Earvin Early was going to help Johnny do it.
Sal Belamo returned the receiver to its cradle and looked disparagingly at Blaine from the chair in the suite’s bedroom. “And you thought a contact of mine coulda been this far off … .”
“Ratansky?”
“According to Illinois prison records, he’s in the Taylorville Correctional Center, all right. Cellblock D, cell twenty-seven. Transferred there from the medium security facility up in Sheridan.”
“Except he’s lying on a slab in the New York City medical examiner’s office. Funny how a dead man can still be serving time in prison.”
“Beats me, boss.”
“I guess I’ll have to go ask him in person.”
“You sure you wanna do this, Indian?”
Wareagle looked up from the small shoulder bag he was packing on the couch in the suite’s living room section. “It is not a question of
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