Black House (42 page)

The truth is, Jack Sawyer seems only slightly interested in George Potter. Ditto the horrific photos, although they must certainly be authentic; Railsback has I.D.’d Johnny Irkenham’s yellow Kiwanis Little League shirt, a detail never given to the press. Even the loathsome Wendell Green never ferreted out that particular fact.

What Jack asks about—not once but several times—is the guy Andy Railsback saw in the hallway.

“Blue robe, one slipper, and that’s all I know!” Dale is finally forced to admit. “Jesus, Jack, what does it matter? Listen, I have to get off the telephone.”

“Ding-dong,” Jack replies, equably enough, and rings off.

Dale turns into the foggy parking lot. He sees Ernie Therriault and the biker-brewer called Doc standing outside the back door, talking. They are little more than shadows in the drifting fog.

Dale’s conversation with Jack has left him feeling very uneasy, as if there are huge clues and signposts that he (dullard that he is) has entirely missed. But what clues? For Christ’s sake,
what
signposts? And now a dash of resentment flavors his unease. Perhaps a high-powered Lucas Davenport type like Jack Sawyer just can’t believe in the obvious. Perhaps guys like him are always more interested in the dog that
doesn’t
bark.

Sound travels well in the fog, and halfway to the station’s back door, Dale hears motorcycle engines explode into life down by the river. Down on Nailhouse Row.

“Dale,” Ernie says. He nods a greeting as if this were any ordinary evening.

“Hey, Chief,” Doc chips in. He’s smoking an unfiltered cigarette, looks to Dale like a Pall Mall or a Chesterfield.
Some doctor,
Dale thinks. “If I may egregiously misquote Misterogers,” Doc goes on, “it’s a beautiful night in the neighborhood. Wouldn’t you say?”

“You called them,” Dale says, jerking his head in the direction of the revving motorcycles. Two pairs of headlights swing into the parking lot. Dale sees Tom Lund behind the wheel of the first car. The second vehicle is almost certainly Danny Tcheda’s personal. The troops are gathering once more. Hopefully this time they can avoid any cataclysmic fuckups. They better. This time they could be playing for all the marbles.

“Well, I couldn’t comment on that directly,” Doc says, “but I could ask, If they were your friends, what would you do?”

“Same damn thing,” Dale says, and goes inside.

Henry Leyden once more sits primly in the passenger seat of the Ram pickup. Tonight he’s dressed in an open-collared white shirt and a pair of trim blue khakis. Slim as a male model, silvering hair combed back. Did Sydney Carton look any cooler going to the guillotine? Even in Charles Dickens’s mind? Jack doubts it.

“Henry—”

“I know,” Henry says. “Sit here in the truck like a good little boy until I’m called.”

“With the doors locked. And don’t say
Oui, mon capitaine.
That one’s wore out.”

“Will
affirmative
do?”

“Nicely.”

The fog thickens as they near town, and Jack dips his headlights—high beams are no good in this shit. He looks at the dashboard clock. 7:03
P.M.
Things are speeding up. He’s glad. Do more, think less, Jack Sawyer’s recipe for E-Z care sanity.

“I’ll whisk you inside as soon as they’ve got Potter jugged.”

“You don’t expect them to have a problem with that, do you?”

“No,” Jack says, then changes the subject. “You know, you surprised me with that Slobberbone record.” He can’t really call it a song, not when the lead vocalist simply shrieked most of the lyrics at the top of his lungs. “That was good.”

“It’s the lead guitar that makes the record,” Henry says, picking up on Jack’s careful use of the word. “Surprisingly sophisticated. Usually the best you can hope for is in tune.” He unrolls his window, sticks his head out like a dog, then pulls it back in. Speaking in that same conversational voice, he says: “The whole town reeks.”

“It’s the fog. It pulls up the river’s stinkiest essence.”

“No,” Henry replies matter-of-factly, “it’s death. I smell it, and I think you do, too. Only maybe not with your nose.”

“I smell it,” Jack admits.

“Potter’s the wrong man.”

“I think so.”

“The man Railsback saw was a Judas goat.”

“The man Railsback saw was almost certainly the Fisherman.”

They drive in silence for a while.

“Henry?”

“Affirmative.”

“What’s the best record? The best record and the best song?”

Henry thinks about it. “Do you realize what a dreadfully personal question that is?”

“Yes.”

Henry thinks some more, then says: “ ‘Stardust,’ maybe. Hoagy Carmichael. For you?”

The man behind the wheel thinks back, all the way back to when Jacky was six. His father and Uncle Morgan had been the jazz fiends; his mother had had simpler tastes. He remembers her playing the same song over and over one endless L.A. summer, sitting and looking out the window and smoking.
Who is that lady, Mom?
Jacky asks, and his mother says,
Patsy Cline. She died in an airplane crash.

“ ‘Crazy Arms,’ ” Jack says. “The Patsy Cline version. Written by Ralph Mooney and Chuck Seals. That’s the best record. That’s the best song.”

Henry says no more for the rest of the drive. Jack is crying.

Henry can smell his tears.

Let us now take the wider view, as some politician or other no doubt said. We almost have to, because things have begun to overlap. While Beezer and the rest of the Thunder Five are arriving in the FLPD parking lot just off Sumner Street, Dale and Tom Lund and Bobby Dulac—bulky in their Kevlar vests—are double-parking in front of Lucky’s. They park in the street because Dale wants plenty of room to swing the back door of the cruiser wide, so that Potter can be bundled in as fast as possible. Next door, Dit Jesperson and Danny Tcheda are at the Nelson Hotel, where they will cordon off room 314 with yellow
POLICE LINE
tape. Once that’s done, their orders are to bring Andy Railsback and Morty Fine to the police station. Inside the police station, Ernie Therriault is calling WSP officers Brown and Black, who will arrive after the fact . . . and if they’re pissed about that, good deal. At the Sand Bar, a dead-eyed Tansy Freneau has just pulled the plug on the jukebox, killing the Wallflowers.
“Listen to me, everybody!”
she cries in a voice that’s not her own.
“They’ve got him! They’ve got the baby-murdering son of a bitch! His name’s Potter! They’ll have him up in Madison by midnight, and unless we do something, some smart lawyer will have him back out on the street by next Monday! WHO WANTS TO HELP ME DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?”
There is a moment of silence . . . and then a roar. The half-stoned, half-drunk habitués of the Sand Bar know
exactly
what they want to do about it. Jack and Henry, meanwhile, with no fog to slow them down until they hit town, swing into the police station parking lot just behind the Thunder Five, who park in a line around Doc’s Fat Boy. The lot is filling up rapidly, mostly with cops’ personal vehicles. Word of the impending arrest has spread like fire in dry grass. Inside, one of Dale’s crew—we need not bother with exactly which one—spots the blue cell phone Doc used outside Lucky’s. This cop grabs it and ducks into the closet-sized room marked
EVIDENCE STORAGE.

At the Oak Tree Inn, where he has checked in for the duration of the Fisherman case, Wendell Green is getting sullenly drunk. In spite of three double whiskeys, his neck still aches from having his camera pulled off by the biker asshole, and his gut still aches from being sucker punched by the Hollywood asshole. The parts of him that hurt most of all, however, are his pride and his pocketbook. Sawyer concealed evidence just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. Wendell is halfway to believing that Sawyer
himself
is the Fisherman . . . but how can he prove either thing with his film gone? When the bartender says he has a call, Wendell almost tells him to stick the call up his ass. But he’s a professional, goddamnit, a
professional news hawk,
and so he goes over to the bar and takes the phone.

“Green,” he growls.

“Hello, asshole,” says the cop with the blue cell phone. Wendell doesn’t yet know his caller is a cop, only that it’s some cheery ghoul poaching on his valuable drinking time. “You want to print some good news for a change?”

“Good news doesn’t sell papers, my pal.”

“This will. We caught the guy.”

“What?”
In spite of the three doubles, Wendell Green is suddenly the most undrunk man on the planet.

“Did I stutter?” The caller is positively gloating, but Wendell Green no longer cares. “We caught the Fisherman. Not the staties, not the Feebs,
us.
Name’s George Potter. Early seventies. Retired builder. Had Polaroids of all three dead kids. If you hustle, you can maybe be here to snap the picture when Dale takes him inside.”

This thought—this
shining possibility—
explodes in Wendell Green’s head like a firework. Such a photo could be worth five times as much as one of little Irma’s corpse, because the reputable mags would want it. And TV! Also, think of this: What if someone shot the bastard as Marshall Dillon was taking him in? Given the town’s mood, it’s far from impossible. Wendell has a brief and brilliant memory of Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his stomach, mouth open in his dying yawp.

“Who is this?” he blurts.

“Officer Fucking Friendly,” the voice on the other end says, and clicks off.

In Lucky’s Tavern, Patty Loveless is now informing those assembled (older than the Sand Bar crowd, and a good deal less interested in nonalcoholic substances) that she can’t get no satisfaction and her tractor can’t get no traction. George Potter has finished his spaghetti, neatly folded his napkin (which in the end had to catch only a single drop of red-sauce), and turned seriously to his beer. Sitting close to the juke as he is, he doesn’t notice that the room has quieted with the entrance of three men, only one in uniform but all three armed and wearing what look too much like bulletproof vests to be anything else.

“George Potter?” someone says, and George looks up. With his glass in one hand and his pitcher of suds in the other, he is a sitting duck.

“Yeah, what about it?” he asks, and then he is snatched by the arms and shoulders and yanked from his spot. His knees connect with the bottom of the table, overturning it. The spaghetti plate and the pitcher hit the floor. The plate shatters. The pitcher, made of sterner stuff, does not. A woman screams. A man says, “Yow!” in a low and respectful voice.

Potter holds on to his partly filled glass for a moment, and then Tom Lund plucks this potential weapon from his hand. A second later, Dale Gilbertson is snapping on the cuffs, and Dale has time to think that it’s the most satisfying sound he’s ever heard in his life.
His
tractor has finally gotten some traction, by God.

This deal is light-years from the snafu at Ed’s; this is slick and tidy. Less than ten seconds after Dale asked the only question—“George Potter?”—the suspect is out the door and into the fog. Tom has one elbow, Bobby the other. Dale is still rattling off the Miranda warning, sounding like an auctioneer on amphetamines, and George Potter’s feet never touch the sidewalk.

Jack Sawyer is fully alive for the first time since he was twelve years old, riding back from California in a Cadillac Eldorado driven by a werewolf. He has an idea that later on he will pay a high price for this regained vividness, but he hopes he will just button his lip and fork over when the time comes. Because the rest of his adult life now seems so
gray.

He stands outside his truck, looking in the window at Henry. The air is dank and already charged with excitement. He can hear the blue-white parking lot lights sizzling, like something frying in hot juices.

“Henry.”

“Affirmative.”

“Do you know the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“Of course I do. Everyone knows ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

Jack says, “ ‘Was blind but now I see.’ I understand that now.”

Henry turns his blind, fearfully intelligent face toward Jack. He is smiling. It is the second-sweetest smile Jack has ever seen. The blue ribbon still goes to Wolf, that dear friend of his wandering twelfth autumn. Good old Wolf, who liked everything right here and now.

“You’re back, aren’t you?”

Standing in the parking lot, our old friend grins. “Jack’s back, that’s affirmative.”

“Then go do what you came back to do,” Henry says.

“I want you to roll up the windows.”

“And not be able to hear? I think not,” Henry tells him, pleasantly enough.

More cops are coming, and this time the blue lights of the lead car are flashing and the siren is blurping. Jack detects a celebratory note to those little blurps and decides he doesn’t have time to stand here arguing with Henry about the Ram’s windows.

He heads for the back door of the police station, and two of the blue-white arcs cast his shadow double on the fog, one dark head north and one south.

Part-time officers Holtz and Nestler pull in behind the car bearing Gilbertson, Lund, Dulac, and Potter. We don’t care much about Holtz and Nestler. Next in line is Jesperson and Tcheda, with Railsback and Morton Fine in the back seat (Morty is complaining about the lack of knee room). We care about Railsback, but he can wait. Next into the lot—oh, this is interesting, if not entirely unexpected: Wendell Green’s beat-up red Toyota, with the man himself behind the wheel. Around his neck is his backup camera, a Minolta that’ll keep taking pictures as long as Wendell keeps pressing the button. No one from the Sand Bar—not yet—but there
is
one more car waiting to turn into the already crowded lot. It’s a discreet green Saab with a
POLICE POWER
sticker on the left side of the bumper and one reading
HUGS NOT DRUGS
on the right. Behind the wheel of the Saab, looking stunned but determined to do the right thing (whatever the right thing might be), is Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski.

Standing in a line against the brick wall of the police station are the Thunder Five. They wear identical denim vests with gold
5
’s on the left breast. Five sets of meaty arms are crossed on five broad chests. Doc, Kaiser Bill, and Sonny wear their hair in thick ponytails. Mouse’s is cornrowed tonight. And Beezer’s floods down over his shoulders, making him look to Jack a little like Bob Seger in his prime. Earrings twinkle. Tats flex on huge biceps.