Firestarter (15 page)

—like the sound of a—

—
shower, Charlie must be in the shower.

He opened his eyes and looked at an unfamiliar beamed ceiling.
Where are we?

It fell back into place, a piece at a time, but there was an instant of frightened free-fall that came of having been in too many places over the last year, of having too many close shaves and being under too much pressure. He thought longingly of his dream and wished he could be back in it with Granther McGee, who had been dead for twenty years now.

Hastings Glen. He was in Hastings Glen.
They
were in Hastings Glen.

He wondered about his head. It hurt, but not like last night, when that bearded guy had let them off. The pain was down to a steady low throb. If this one followed previous history, the throb would be just a faint ache by this evening, and entirely gone by tomorrow.

The shower was turned off.

He sat up in bed and looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven.

“Charlie?”

She came back into the bedroom, rubbing herself vigorously with a towel.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“Good morning. How are you?”

“Hungry,” she said. She went over to the chair where she had put her clothes and picked up the green blouse. Sniffed it. Grimaced. “I need to change my clothes.”

“You'll have to make do with those for a while, babe. We'll get you something later on today.”

“I hope we don't have to wait that long to eat.”

“We'll hitch a ride,” he said, “and stop at the first café we come to.”

“Daddy, when I started school, you told me never to ride with strangers.” She was into her underpants and green blouse, and was looking at him curiously.

Andy got out of bed, walked over to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “The devil you don't know is sometimes better than the one you do,” he said. “Do you know what that means, keed?”

She thought about it carefully. The devil they knew was those men from the Shop, she guessed. The men that had chased them down the street in New York the day before. The devil they didn't know—

“I guess it means that most people driving cars don't work for that Shop,” she said.

He smiled back. “You got it. And what I said before still holds, Charlie: when you get into a bad fix, you sometimes have to do things you'd never do if things were going good.”

Charlie's smile faded. Her face became serious, watchful. “Like getting the money to come out of the phones?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And it wasn't bad?”

“No. Under the circumstances, it wasn't bad.”

“Because when you get into a bad fix, you do what you have to do to get out of it.”

“With some exceptions, yes.”

“What are exceptions, Daddy?”

He ruffled her hair. “Never mind now, Charlie. Lighten up.”

But she wouldn't. “And I didn't mean to set that man's shoes on fire. I didn't do it on purpose.”

“No, of course you didn't.”

Then she did lighten up; her smile, so much like Vicky's, came out radiantly. “How does your head feel this morning, Daddy?”

“Much better, thanks.”

“Good.” She looked at him closely. “Your eye looks funny.”

“Which eye?”

She pointed at his left. “That one.”

“Yeah?” He went into the bathroom and wiped a clear place on the steamed mirror.

He looked at his eye for a long time, his good humor fading. His right eye looked just as it always had, a gray green—the color of the ocean on an overcast spring day. His left eye was also gray green, but the white was badly bloodshot, and the pupil looked smaller than the right pupil. And the eyelid had a peculiar droop that he had never noticed before.

Vicky's voice suddenly rang into his mind. It was so clear that she might have been standing beside him.
The headaches, they scare me, Andy. You're doing something to yourself as well as to other people when you use that push or whatever you want to call it.

The thought was followed by the image of a balloon being blown up … and up … and up … and finally exploding with a loud bang.

He began to go over the left side of his face carefully, touching it everywhere with the tips of his right fingers. He looked like a man in a TV commercial marveling over the closeness of his shave. He found three spots—one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the left temple—where there was no feeling at all. Fright drifted through the hollow places of his body like quiet early-evening mist. The fright was not so much for himself as it was for Charlie, for what would happen to her if she got left on her own.

As if he had called her, he could see her beyond him in the mirror.

“Daddy?” She sounded a little scared. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he said. His voice sounded good. There was no tremor in it; nor was it too confident, falsely booming. “Just thinking how much I need a shave.”

She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Scratchy like a Brillo pad. Yuck. Gross.”

He chased her into the bedroom and rubbed his scratchy cheek against her smooth one. Charlie giggled and kicked.

As Andy was tickling his daughter with his stubbly beard, Orville Jamieson, aka OJ, aka The Juice, and another Shop agent named Bruce Cook were getting out of a light-blue Chevy outside the Hastings Diner.

OJ paused for a moment, looking down Main Street with its slant parking, its appliance store, its grocery store, its two gas stations, its one drugstore, its wooden municipal building with a plaque out front commemorating some historical event no one gave a shit about. Main Street was also Route 40, and the McGees were not four miles from where OJ and Bruce Cook now stood.

“Look at this burg,” OJ said, disgusted. “I grew up close to here. Town called Lowville. You ever heard of Lowville, New York?”

Bruce Cook shook his head.

“It's near Utica, too. Where they make Utica Club beer. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day I got out of Lowville.” OJ reached under his jacket and readjusted The Windsucker in its holster.

“There's Tom and Steve,” Bruce said. Across the street, a light-brown Pacer had pulled into a parking slot just vacated by a farm truck. Two men in dark suits were getting out of the Pacer. They looked like bankers. Farther down the street, at the blinker light, two more Shop people were talking to the old cunt that crossed the school kids at lunchtime. They were showing her the picture and she was shaking her head. There were ten Shop agents here in Hastings Glen, all of them coordinating with Norville Bates, who was back in Albany waiting for Cap's personal ramrod, Al Steinowitz.

“Yeah, Lowville,” OJ sighed. “I hope we get those two suckers by noon. And I hope my next assignment's Karachi. Or Iceland. Anyplace, as long as it's not upstate New York. This is too close to Lowville. Too close for comfort.”

“You think we will have them by noon?” Bruce asked.

OJ shrugged. “We'll have them by the time the sun goes down. You can count on that.”

They went into the diner, sat at the counter, and ordered coffee. A young waitress with a fine figure brought it to them.

“How long you been on, sis?” OJ asked her.

“If you got a sis, I pity her,” the waitress said. “If there's any fambly resemblance, that is.”

“Don't be that way, sis,” OJ said, and showed her his ID. She looked at it a long time. Behind her, an aging juvenile delinquent in a motorcycle jacket was pushing buttons on a Seeberg.

“I been on since seven,” she said. “Same as any other morning. Prolly you want to talk to Mike. He's the owner.” She started to turn away and OJ caught her wrist in a tight grip. He didn't like women who made fun of his looks. Most women were sluts anyway, his mother had been right about that even if she hadn't been right about much else. And his mother surely would have known what to think about a high-tit bitch like this one.

“Did I say I wanted to talk to the owner, sis?”

She was starting to be frightened now, and that was okay with OJ. “N-no.”

“That's right. Because I want to talk to you, not to some guy that's been out in the kitchen scrambling eggs and making Alpoburgers all morning.” He took the picture of Andy and Charlie out of his pocket and handed it to her, not letting go of her wrist. “You recognize them, sis? Serve them their breakfast this morning, maybe?”

“Let go. You're
hurting
me.” All the color had gone out of her face except for the whore's rouge she had tricked herself up with. Probably she had been a cheerleader in high school. The kind of girl who laughed at Orville Jamieson when he asked them out because he had been president of the Chess Club instead of quarterback on the football team. Bunch of cheap Lowville whores. God, he hated New York. Even New York City was too fucking close.

“You tell me if you waited on them or if you didn't. Then I'll let go.
Sis
.”

She looked briefly at the picture. “No! I didn't. Now let—”

“You didn't look long enough,
sis.
You better look again.”

She looked again. “No! No!” she said loudly. “I've never seen them! Let me go, can't you?”

The elderly jd in the cutrate Mammoth Mart leather
jacket sauntered over, zippers jingling, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets.

“You're bothering the lady,” he said.

Bruce Cook gazed at him with open, wide-eyed contempt. “Be careful we don't decide to bother you next, pizza-face,” he said.

“Oh,” the old kid in the leather jacket said, and his voice was suddenly very small. He moved away quickly, apparently remembering that he had pressing business on the street.

Two old ladies in a booth were nervously watching the little scene at the counter. A big man in reasonably clean cook's whites—Mike, the owner, presumably—was standing in the kitchen doorway, also watching. He held a butcher knife in one hand, but he held it with no great authority.

“What do you guys want?” he asked.

“They're feds,” the waitress said nervously. “They—”

“Didn't serve them? You're sure?” OJ asked.
“Sis?”

“I'm sure,” she said. She was nearly crying now.

“You better be. A mistake can get you five years in jail,
sis.
”

“I'm sure,” she whispered. A tear spilled over the bottom curve of one eye and slipped down her cheek. “Please let go. Don't hurt me anymore.”

OJ squeezed tighter for a brief moment, liking the feel of the small bones moving under his hand, liking the knowledge that he could squeeze harder yet and snap them … and then he let go. The diner was silent except for the voice of Stevie Wonder coming from the Seeberg, assuring the frightened patrons of the Hastings Diner that they could feel it all over. Then the two old ladies got up and left in a hurry.

OJ picked up his coffee cup, leaned over the counter, poured the coffee on the floor, and then dropped the cup, which shattered. Thick china shrapnel sprayed in a dozen different directions. The waitress was crying openly now.

“Shitty brew,” OJ said.

The owner made a halfhearted gesture with the knife, and OJ's face seemed to light up.

“Come on, man,” he said, half-laughing. “Come on. Let's see you try.”

Mike put the knife down beside the toaster and suddenly cried out in shame and outrage: “I fought in Vietnam! My brother fought in Vietnam! I'm gonna write my congressman about this! You wait and see if I don't!”

OJ looked at him. After a while Mike lowered his eyes, scared.

The two of them went out.

The waitress scooched and began to pick up broken pieces of coffee cup, sobbing.

Outside, Bruce said, “How many motels?”

“Three motels, six sets of tourist cabins,” OJ said, looking down toward the blinker. It fascinated him. In the Lowville of his youth there had been a diner with a plaque over the double Silex hotplate and that plaque had read
IF YOU DON'T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE
. How many times had he longed to pull that plaque off the wall and stuff it down someone's throat?

“There are people checking them out,” he said as they walked back toward their light-blue Chevrolet, part of a government motor pool paid for and maintained by tax dollars. “We'll know soon now.”

John Mayo was with an agent named Ray Knowles. They were on their way out along Route 40 to the Slumberland Motel. They were driving a late-model tan Ford, and as they rode up the last hill separating them from an actual view of the motel, a tire blew.

“Shit-
fire,
” John said as the car began to pogo up and down and drag to the right. “That's fucking government issue for you. Fucking retreads.” He pulled over onto the soft shoulder and put on the Ford's four-way flashers. “You go on,” he said. “I'll change the goddam tire.”

“I'll help,” Ray said. “It won't take us five minutes.”

“No, go on. It's right over this hill, should be.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I'll pick you up. Unless the spare's flat, too. It wouldn't surprise me.”

A rattling farm truck passed them. It was the one OJ and Bruce Cook had seen leaving town as they stood outside the Hastings Diner.

Ray grinned. “It better not be. You'd have to put in a requisition in quadruplicate for a new one.”

John didn't grin back. “Don't I know it,” he said glumly.

They went around to the trunk and Ray unlocked it. The spare was in good shape.

“Okay,” John said. “Go on.”

“It really wouldn't take but five minutes to change that sucker.”

“Sure, and those two aren't at that motel. But let's play it as if it were real. After all, they have to be somewhere.”