So Cold the River (2010) (35 page)

The two of them walked through the empty room to a dark staircase in the back, went down the steep, shadowed steps. At the
base of the stairs was a closed door, and Campbell opened it without knocking and stepped inside.

“Easy there,” he said. A short but muscular black man was standing just inside the door and had lifted a gun when Campbell
intruded. There was another man, much larger, probably close to three hundred pounds, hulking on a stool on the other side
of the door, and a third, rail-thin and very dark-skinned, seated behind a wooden desk. He leaned back in the chair with his
feet propped on the desk, enormous feet, a pair of equally large hands folded over his stomach. He didn’t speak or move when
Campbell and the boy entered, just flicked his eyes over and studied them without a change in expression. The man with the
gun lowered it slowly and moved a step back from Campbell.

“Shadrach,” Campbell said.

“Mr. Hunter is what I’m called by those who aren’t friends,” the man behind the desk said.

“Shadrach,” Campbell said again, no change of tone at all.

Shadrach Hunter gave that a wry curling of the lip that seemed to pass for amusement, and then he looked past Campbell to
Lucas.

“This is Thomas Granger’s boy?”

“His nephew.”

“What in hell’s he carrying the fiddle for?”

“He likes to have it with him,” Campbell said. “You’ve heard him play.”

“I have.” Shadrach Hunter was regarding Lucas with a distrustful squint. “Plays like no boy should.”

It sounded like a reprimand. Lucas had kept his eyes on the floor since entering the room, and they stayed there now.

“I’ve got the car out front,” Campbell said, “and it’s raining mighty strong. Best be stepping to it.”

“Might not be the best night for a long drive, then.”

“It ain’t far. Just out beyond the gulf. You’ve been out there, and don’t tell me otherwise, you lying son of a bitch. You’ve
been looking for it on your own. I’m here to tell you that as of now, that spring is
mine
. You want a piece, you’re going through me to get it.”

Shadrach gave him a dour stare. “I still don’t know why you think I’d be fool enough to partner with you, Bradford.”

“Sure, you do. There’s money to be made. You’re a man, like myself, who appreciates his money.”

“So you’ve told me. But I’m also a man has made his money by staying away from those of your sort as much as possible.”

“Hell, Shadrach, I don’t care about the color of your damn skin, I care about the size of your capital.”

“You the only one talking about color,” Shadrach Hunter said in a soft voice.

Campbell went quiet and stared at him. Just outside the wall, water streamed through a gutter and exited in noisy splatters.
The wind was blowing hard.

“You might have some dollars saved,” Campbell said, “but there are no more coming your way, Shadrach. With the way white folks
around here are hurting, how you think your people will fare? Now, I got an offer that’s been made, and you can
take it or leave it. You’ve tasted the whiskey. You know what it’s worth.”

“There’s whiskey all over.”

“You find any matches that? Shit, Old Number Seven ain’t nothing but piss water compared to that. I got connections in Chicago
who’ll be ready to pay prices you ain’t even imagined for it.”

“Then why you down here looking for me?”

“Because,” Campbell Bradford said, “some projects require a piece of assistance. And I’ve been told you’re the only man in
this valley got a heart as black as mine.”

Shadrach Hunter showed his teeth in a grin, then said softly, “Oh, there ain’t nobody in this valley comes close to that,
Bradford. And that’s a known fact.”

Campbell spread his hands. “Car’s out front, Shadrach. I’m getting back in it.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then Shadrach Hunter nodded and dropped his feet to the floor and stood up. His two
companions moved toward the door with him, but Campbell shook his head.

“No. You ride with me, you ride alone, Shadrach.”

Shadrach stopped cold at that, looking displeased, but after a long pause he nodded. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and
took out a pistol and slid it into his belt. He took a long jacket, still streaked from rain, off a peg on the wall and put
that on, and then he reached back in the desk drawer and took out another gun, a small automatic, and put it in the jacket
pocket. He kept his hand in the pocket.

Campbell smiled. “Brave enough yet?”

Shadrach didn’t answer as he walked for the door. He went out and up the stairs, followed by Campbell, Lucas in the rear.
The top of the stairs was utterly black, and as Shadrach Hunter
stepped into it, he disappeared. Then Campbell did the same, and finally there was nothing left but a pale square from the
back of Lucas’s white shirt. Then that was gone, too, and there were voices and sounds of people moving in the hotel and Eric
realized he was sitting on the balcony with an empty bottle of water in his hand.

Empty.

He’d had every drop.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
, he did not feel relief when the vision passed. Instead, he felt almost disappointed. Cheated.

It had been too abrupt, like a film cut off in midscene. Yes, that was exactly what it was like—always before he’d gotten
a full scene, and this time it had ended without closure.

“I got the name,” he said aloud, recalling all that he’d seen. “He said the damn name. Granger. Thomas Granger. Lucas is his
nephew.”

The realization was exciting; the disappointment that countered was that the men had been bound for the spring when he lost
the vision. If he could have stayed there longer, remained in the past, he might have seen the way to it. He was seeing the
story,
seeing more than random images, but now it was gone. Lucas and Campbell and Shadrach Hunter had been replaced by the reality
of the hotel once again, and he held an empty bottle
in his hand, which was astounding, because he didn’t remember drinking it. And troubling, because this meant he was out.

The effective dose had, in the space of forty-eight hours, increased dramatically.

“Tolerance,” he said. “You’re building a tolerance.”

Disconcerting, maybe, but not drastic. He’d just have to keep tweaking it, that was all. Surely, his need would plateau at
some point. He wasn’t going to run out of the stuff. Springs abounded in the area, filled pipes and poured from faucets down
in the spa.

Poured from faucets. Indeed it did.

There was no need for another drink. Not now. His headache was gone; the sickness had been avoided.

But he could see the story again if he had more water.

He looked at the empty bottle in his hand and thought about the conversation he’d had with Claire, her insistence that he’d
always been prone toward psychic tendencies. Hell, he knew that. He’d lived through the moments, after all, from the valley
in the Bear Paws to the Infiniti to the snapshot of the red cottage for the Harrelson video.

The ability had always been there. The gift, if you wanted to call it that. The only change now was that the water gave him
some control over it. He’d been scared of the stuff initially, but was that the right response? Should he fear it, or should
he embrace it?

“You’ve got to shoot this,” he said softly. “Document it and shoot it.”

Kellen’s response to the idea had been less than enthusiastic. The look he’d given Eric had been more doubtful than any of
the looks he’d offered after discussions of ghosts and visions and the rest, and what in the hell kind of sense did that make?
Oh, well,
Kellen didn’t have to be involved. He didn’t appreciate the possibility the way Eric did. It was the sort of thing that was
so damn strange, people wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. He could imagine the interviews already—Larry King’s jaw dropping
as Eric sat there and calmly explained the circumstances that had led to the film.
The gift was always there… always with me. It just took me a long time to get control of it. To learn how to use it.

He got to his feet and went back inside the room. There was an extension number for the spa listed on the card beside the
phone. He called.

The girl who answered told him the spa was closing in thirty minutes. There wasn’t enough time for a session, she explained.
A session? All he wanted was to see the damn mineral bath. He told her as much, and was met with polite but firm resistance.

“Sessions in the mineral bath run for half an hour or an hour. There’s not enough time for that, sorry. We can schedule you
tomorrow.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ll pay for a full session.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we just can’t—”

“And tip you a hundred dollars,” he said, the situation suddenly feeling urgent to him as he looked at the empty bottle in
his hand. “I’ll be out by nine, when you close.”

“All right,” she said after a long pause. “But you’re going to want to hurry down here, or you won’t get much time at all.”

“That’s all right. Say, do you have any plastic water bottles down there?”

“Um, yes.”

He said he was glad to hear that they did.

The spa was beautiful, filled with high-grade stone and ornate trim, fireplaces crackling. He’d routinely mocked men he knew
in California who frequented such places, too much of the Missouri farm-town boyhood still in him to sample that lifestyle.
Yet here he stood in a white robe and slippers, padding along behind an attractive blond girl who was opening a frosted door
that led to the mineral bath.

“It’s a complete re-creation of the originals,” she said, pausing with the door half open. “But most people these days do
add aromatherapy. Are you sure you don’t—”

“I want the natural water,” he said. “Nothing else.”

“Okay,” she said, and opened the door. The potent stench of sulfur was immediately present, and the blond girl grimaced, clearly
horrified that he hadn’t elected to go with the scent of vanilla or lavender or butterfly wings or whatever the hell it was
that you were supposed to use.

“You might feel a little light-headed at first,” she said. “Kind of giddy. That’s from all the gases that are released by
the water, lithium and such. There’s a complete list of the chemical content there on the counter if you’re int—”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be all set.”

She’d been on the verge of a full introductory speech, he could tell, and he didn’t want to waste time. He wanted to get to
work emptying the two plastic water bottles she’d given him and filling them with Pluto Water.

She left then, and he was alone in the green-tiled room that stank of sulfur. The tub was still filling, pouring out of the
hotwater faucet only. There were two faucets, the girl had told him, both depositing mineral water directly from the spring,
with the only difference being that one carried water that had been heated to one hundred and two degrees.

There was a sink across from the tub, and he poured the water from his bottles into that, shook them as dry as possible, and
returned to the tub. He turned on the cold-water faucet,
cupped his hand, and caught some of the water. Lifted it to his mouth and sampled, frowning and licking his lips like some
asshole wine connoisseur. It tasted different from Anne McKinney’s, crisper and cleaner. Of course, it hadn’t been in a glass
bottle for eighty years. Just because it tasted different didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. He hoped.

He filled one bottle about a third and then pulled it back from the faucet and stared at it, thinking of the last vision he’d
had, of the boy vanishing up the stairs beside Campbell Bradford and Shadrach Hunter. Where had they gone? What had happened
next?

The idea that had slipped into his mind was growing legs now: if he could find ways to document this, if he could tell a tale
that had been hidden from historians, hidden from the eyes of ordinary men, well, the result would be extraordinary. In the
past, he’d never discussed his rare and brief flashes with anyone but Claire, because a man who claimed psychic tendencies
would quickly be dismissed as a lunatic. It was the way of the world. But suppose he could
prove
what he’d seen as the truth. And suppose, with the water as his aid, he could do it again, on another story. A self-proclaimed
psychic was the subject of ridicule, but a proven entity, a film director whose exclusive ability allowed him to shatter secrets
and expose the unknown, would be something else entirely. He’d be a star. Beyond that. A legend. Famous as famous got.

It was a fantasy. But there was also a possibility, perhaps a stronger one than he dared admit, that it could become a reality.
See the story, document it, and turn to the Hollywood connections he had left. There were publicists and agents who’d salivate
at the very idea. And once the buzz began…

But first he had to see the rest of it. First he had to know what had happened. The water would provide that for him.

In a soft voice, he said, “Show me. Show me what happened,” and drank. Drank it all. That done, he leaned back to the faucet.

Once both bottles were filled, he put them in the pocket of the big robe, then looked around the room and watched the water
cascade into that old-fashioned tub. What the hell, he’d come down here, and he’d paid for it.

He took off the robe and his underwear and stepped down into the water, finding it the perfect temperature for soaking sore
muscles. He probably had only ten minutes left, but that was all he’d need. He’d never been one for hot tubs, really.

But this one did feel good. Felt incredible, really, like it was finding kinks and knots in his muscles and lifting them away,
lifting him a little bit, too. That must be the gas from the mineral blend. It did make you a little giddy, at that.

He flicked his eyes open and inhaled deeply, breathing in those mellowing fumes. The ceiling looked different. For a moment
he was confused, unsure of the change, but then he realized—there was a fan overhead now, wide blades paddling lazily through
the air. That hadn’t been there before, had it? He rolled his head sideways then, back toward the door, and saw he was no
longer alone.