“The other business,” Webster said. “About your planning to call me and him phoning to say don’t bother, that was just theatrics. He knew you’d want to get in touch with me about his first call, so he just waited until you thought I’d had time to get back to the station, and then he made his second call to tell you not to. That way it looked as if he was reading your mind. There was always the chance he would have been too late, that you would already have phoned me, in which case his second call would have seemed like he had a tap on your phone.”
“At least my way we had a direction to hunt for him,” he answered weakly.
“Listen to me. I could have said this when you called. I didn’t need to come back out here to say it, but I wanted to see your face and make sure you understood. Finding him isn’t your worry—it’s mine. All you need to worry about is keeping control.”
“What the hell good will that do? You see what I’m like. Supposing I do manage to get myself together, that won’t stop them from coming for us.”
“Them? We don’t know it’s more than one.”
“It’s anywhere between eight and twelve. That’s the way they operate. In a cell. And they always work together.”
“I asked the FBI for a list of Kess’s people from around here.”
“That won’t do any good either. Kess doesn’t keep membership records. His orders go from word of mouth down through his subordinates. The FBI might know about a few of them from this area, but there’s no way to link any of them together.”
“You ought to know; you were right about Kess anyhow. In February, when the grand jury indicted him, he did go underground. There’s a rumor he’s in the British West Indies. Another rumor that he’s in Hawaii.”
“Or right here.”
Webster looked hard at him. “You just keep control. There are a lot of things I can do to protect you. A man will be here shortly to put a tap on your phone. If your guy calls again, we have a chance to trace him. I sent Ford out to the dairy you get your milk from. He’s tracking down the delivery man. I should have a report soon on the kind of poison that was used, and with any luck we’ll be able to trace that too.”
“They got it from a plant nursery.”
It was once too often he had told Webster his job, and Webster stiffened. “I
know
. I’ll
check
on it.” He opened his mouth to say something more, paused uncomfortably, and glanced at the rug. “I had another reason for coming back out here. A message I got from the doctor when I reached the station…. I apologize. It’s not often I let things get through to me. There were no bruises on the body.”
“Sure.” It was almost funny.
12
But Webster must have had still another reason for coming back to the house, and it wasn’t just the questions he started asking because the answers were all in the magazine article he’d been given.
“That’s fine. Tell me anyhow,” Webster said.
He took a deep drag that almost burned the cigarette down to its filter before he crushed it out. “All right. The first thing I saw when the guard showed me into Kess’s office was a big magnum revolver weighing down a stack of papers on his desk. There was a handful of cartridges strewn across the desk blotter and a howitzer shell cut off at the base to make an ashtray.”
“You know about guns? You know this was a magnum?”
“I do a lot of research for my books, and I’d recognize a big gun like that anywhere. The biggest. A forty-four. And the first thing Kess said to me when he came smiling from around his desk to shake hands was how sorry he felt that he took so long to grant me an interview.”
“But if he’d stopped seeing reporters in the first place, why did he change his mind and see you?”
“Because I think he was sure he’d be indicted and he was already planning to go underground. The interview was to be his last public statement, and he figured I was the one to make him look as good as possible. Because of my books.”
“If he read them, he was one up on me.” He saw now what Webster was doing—trying to draw him out, to talk everything away and relax. Because the trick was working. His stomach still felt like it had a fist in it, and his arms and legs were still as cold and shaky as ever. But somehow he felt more at ease. Not alone.
“They’re about fear,” he said and lit the fifth cigarette from Webster’s pack. “You’d better take some of these for yourself before I smoke them all.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Then why the cigarettes?”
“I always carry a pack with me for people I’m talking to.”
The trick was working all right, and he had to smile. He sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there. When at last he exhaled, hardly any smoke came out. His throat was scratchy, his mouth dry. “Chases,” he said. “Men on the run alone, hunted down, driven to defend themselves. And Kess saw a lot of himself in that. It’s like he wishes he were back in a rainforest thirty thousand years ago. It’s his big dream, to take his men up into the hills once the enemy invades, and hit supply depots and snipe at enemy patrols, and run away from search parties. That’s the joke of it. He saw himself in my books, so he figured I’d sympathize with him. He granted me an interview, and now I might as well be one of my own characters. Except that they always know what to do, and I can hardly keep from filling my pants.”
“Another except: you’re not alone,” Webster said. “The man who’s coming to tap your phone will stay here to protect you in case anything happens. I have squad cars circling the area to look for any cars or trucks that stop too long or come around too often, and I’ll have a cruiser parked in front of the house very shortly. Don’t worry. We’ll get them before they get you.”
He almost believed that. But then Webster told him “Keep the cigarettes,” and stood up to go, and the ease he’d come to feel drained from him.
“Wait a while more, can’t you?” He sounded like an anxious child. He couldn’t help it.
Webster studied him. “Have you got any guns around the house?”
“Three. A rifle, pistol, and revolver.”
“You know how to use them?”
“My wife and I took an NRA course. An ex-Marine instructor taught us.”
“Well, don’t bother.”
He said it gently, but it came like a slap all the same.
“This isn’t like in books. It’s for real, and I don’t want you shooting one of my men by mistake or somebody else who turns out to have nothing to do with this. Were you in the military?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“College exemption.”
“That just makes it worse. If you go out on your own after one of these guys, you’ll find that writing about shooting a man is a hell of a lot different from having the guts to line up those sights and pull the trigger. You might as well shoot yourself and save the other guy the trouble.”
He had heard that before, seen it, written it, back when Kess had shown him through the classrooms at Chemelec.
“You’ve proven you can hit targets on the shooting range,” the instructor
was
telling his men. “But you’ll find the real thing very different. First off, a live target can shoot back. Second, he won’t oblige you by standing out in the open and waiting to be shot. When you go out on maneuvers next week, we’ll be simulating combat conditions, and we’ll give you practice on concealed targets. In the meantime, go over the list of aiming problems in the manual and memorize the solution. Note the first item. Remember—when shooting at a target that
is
running uphill your tendency will be to aim too low. He IS running up, after all, constantly rising out of your line of fire, so you’ll need to raise your aim accordingly. If you want to hit him between the shoulder blades, shoot for the back of his head.”
Webster was already by the front door.
“Please?” he asked the detective, his voice thin and dry. “Wait a little?”
“For what?”
“The man who’s coming to tap the phone. I guess I’m getting a little paranoid. How will I know he’s really from you? Wait until he gets here, will you? So I can be certain?”
And then the phone rang.
He jerked. Adrenaline scalded into his stomach as he stared down the hall toward the phone and then toward Webster.
But Webster wasn’t there. He was already going down the hall, answering it.
“Hello,” he said flatly. And that was all Webster said from then on. He only listened.
He shifted next to Webster, watching his face, which didn’t change the whole time, and he couldn’t keep from asking, “What is it? What are they saying?”
But Webster just went on listening. Then he swallowed and set the phone gently back on its cradle.
“What is it?” he repeated.
After a pause, “Nothing.”
“But you were listening so long. They must have said something.”
“No. Nothing. It was just quiet breathing.”
“There was something else. I know it. Your face is very good. It doesn’t give a thing away. But your eyes changed.”
“All I heard was breathing.”
“This is my life and my family we’re talking about, and it isn’t your right to hold back on me. Tell me what the hell it was that bothered you.”
Again a pause. “I can’t be sure. That’s why I listened so long. It was just this quiet gentle breathing. But there was an extra tone in it that I didn’t catch at first… I’m still not sure I’m onto it right. But it sounded like a woman.”
13
The doctor had been wrong: Claire didn’t wake up at six as he had said. He pulled up a chair by the bed and sat and looked at her for a long time in the pale light from the closed drapes. She was breathing but that was it, and she didn’t wake at seven either. The light got paler outside through the drapes, and if she didn’t wake by seven-thirty, he was going to phone the doctor.
“Daddy, I’m hungry,” Sarah said in the open bedroom doorway. She had been in her room for the last two hours, doing nothing. Once she had asked him to play a game with her, but he had no heart, and she had gone on doing nothing. He thought of her sitting on her bed, staring at the floor. Little girls weren’t made to have that much patience.
“I am a bit too, I guess,” he said. “Hungry. At least I suppose that I should try and pretend that I’m hungry. But I can’t go down and make something for us. Mommy might wake up while I’m gone.”
If
she wakes up, he thought. She’ll wake up. Sure she will.
But what can you fix to eat anyway? What in the house do you trust? Something on the back shelf in a can. He thought of soup—split pea with ham—and his mouth turned sour.
“Why?” Sarah remained in the open doorway, her head barely even with the light switch.
Might as well come out with it. “Sweetheart, I’m going to tell you something that’s hard to understand. There’s a man who thinks your father did something bad to him, and now some friends of his are out to hurt me. They want to hurt you and Mommy too. They’ve already done that to Ethan and Samantha.”
“Killed them?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I just told you.”
“No, why does the man think you did something bad to him?”
“I wrote some words about him that he didn’t like.”
“Did you have to?”
“I once thought I did. Now—” Now you’re not sure, but you damn well had better be. If it cost you Ethan and maybe everybody else, it damn well had better have been worthwhile.
But it wasn’t.
Claire turned, breathed hard and muttered, “I want my baby.” Then she was motionless again. After several moments, he realized he wasn’t moving either. He tried to relax but couldn’t. His shoulders were so tense they were aching.
When he looked, Sarah wasn’t in the doorway any more.
Then she was back.
“There’s a man downstairs by the phone,” she said, puzzled.
The detective sent here to guard them. That made him angry. “Did you go down when I told you not to?”
Her face lost its composure. “Just a little.”
“You’d better get in your room and stay there.”
He was sorry as soon as he said it. Sarah’s face drooped worse and she looked again as if she were going to cry and he wanted to say he was sorry. But he had to make her realize this was serious. He had to make her obey, and keep on obeying. So he just stared at her and said, “Go on. You heard me. Get to your room.” She turned, looking lonely at him, and went reluctantly away.
The room paled into darkness. He sat unseeing and listened to Claire turning restlessly, muttering, breathing hard, and at last he couldn’t bear it anymore. He had to do something, went over and slid back the drapes and looked out at the night. The streetlight wasn’t working. That bothered him. He could not recall the last time it was out. A match flared in a car parked out there. He tensed even more, stepped instinctively to the side of the window. Then the spot of flame was gone, and he dimly recognized the shape of the dome light on top of what must be a police car.
All the same, he closed the drapes. The dark of the room constricted him. He switched on a dim yellow light in the corner that would not cast his outline through the drapes. He turned toward the bed, and Claire’s eyes were open.
Blank. Unregistering.
But at least they were open.
Slowly they came into focus. “Ethan?” she said, and closed them and opened them. Her lips were thick and cracked and very dry. She edged her tongue along them. “Ethan?”
“Ssshh,” he said. “Take a while to get awake. The doctor gave you a sedative and you’ve been asleep all day.”
“The doctor?” she murmured. Her lips were barely open as she spoke. She raised her hands to her face and drew them down her cheeks and left them listless on her breasts. “What doctor?” she wanted to know faintly. “Where’s Ethan? Were there enough clean diapers for him?”
He looked past her toward the shadowed wall.
“Oh dear Jesus,” she whispered. “He’s dead.”
It swept through him again. The numbness when he’d seen Ethan choke and stiffen and die.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“How do you think I feel?”
“The doctor said I was to make you some soup.”
“I don’t want any.”
“The doctor said that too, but he said I was to make you eat some anyway.”