Song of the Siren 2.02

“What’s Henry doing here?” the whispered question drifted across the darkened room from the paired silhouettes shouting their presence from the window’s moonlit background.
“He’s watching you!” she let the whisper float on the suddenly still air,“for me.”
Both froze at the sound, one watching as Henry lifted his head and looked up at them from the warehouse landing below, white gleaming at them from his moonlit smile so full of the perfect white teeth that looked so out of place in his derelicts demeanor.
“You need to leave now, don’t look back, don’t come back,” her voice sounded flat as they looked in the dark toward the sound of it.
“He’s gone,” the silhouette voiced in surprise as he looked once again out the window. Henry had vanished, but they both knew he wasn’t gone.
They moved towards the door, groping in the darkness. The closest to the door reached toward the light switch.
“No lights!” she said.
They stopped cold for a moment then opened the door and slipped into the hallway.
…
I swept the alley with the rifle’s scope. There was nothing in the night but darkness in the alley, but Henry said she came there to watch him while he knelt in the dark. He said she watched him thinking she was unseen, he wouldn’t say why.
I swept the walls and windows of the building opposite just to break the tedium and saw the startled and reddened face of a baby, eyes wide with the impact of a slapping hand, a hand that slapped far to hard for to little reason, a hand poised at the apex about to descend again, framed from the wrist up in the scopes cross-hairs.
I loosed a whisper from the rifle’s silenced barrel into the night, into the window, into the hand. Between the wrist and knuckles, away to one side away from the thumb, the round tore through bone and flesh and set to spinning out of the scopes field of view two now severed fingers.
No sound came from the open window across the alley except the sobbing of a child. I saw once again a flicker of motion against the alley wall, stealthy and momentary, it was gone in an instant and all else was quiet.
I dropped the rifle from the window as Henry crossed the alley and stopped beneath me. I stepped out onto the fire escape, jumped to the next, then the next, then slid down the drain pipe to the alley floor, Henry was waiting.
“I blew it”, I said, as Henry broke down weapon, putting the pieces one by one in the shoulder case.
“She hit the child often, its why I come here to listen” Henry said, his eyes gleaming in the starlight motioned to window above. “She was standing against the wall in the open, you didn’t see her?”
“No I didn’t, she is very good!” I said.
“No, she is good, but not that good, something else here that I can’t see, helping her, or maybe not really helping her. She won’t be back – it was the child.” he said almost to himself as he looked up at the window again in the night.
“They are still inside, I think they are afraid to leave.” he said.
“Go home Henry.” I said.
“I am home!” he said as he walked to the alley’s end and out onto the street.