Firestarter (5 page)

“He's all right, Charlie. He's okay. They just took him down to the security office. Now, what happened?”

Through diminishing tears, Charlie told him. Overhearing the soldier on the phone. Having a few random thoughts about him, a feeling that he was trying to trick the girl he was talking to. “And then, when I was coming back to you, I saw him … and before I could stop it … it happened. It
just got away. I could have hurt him, Daddy. I could have hurt him bad. I set him on
fire!
”

“Keep your voice down,” he said. “I want you to listen to me, Charlie. I think this is the most encouraging thing that's happened in some time.”

“Y-you do?” She looked at him in frank surprise.

“You say it got away from you,” Andy said, forcing the words. “And it did. But not like before. It only got away a little bit. What happened was dangerous, honey, but … you might have set his hair on fire. Or his face.”

She winced away from that thought, horrified. Andy turned her face gently back to his.

“It's a subconscious thing, and it always goes out at someone you don't like,” he said. “But … you didn't really hurt that guy, Charlie. You …” But the rest of it was gone and only the pain was left. Was he still talking? For a moment he didn't even know.

Charlie could still feel that thing, that Bad Thing, racing around in her head, wanting to get away again, to do something else. It was like a small, vicious, and rather stupid animal. You had to let it out of its cage to do something like getting money from the phones … but it could do something else, something really bad

(like mommy in the kitchen oh mom i'm sorry)

before you could get it back in again. But now it didn't matter. She wouldn't think about it now, she wouldn't think about

(
the bandages my mommy has to wear bandages because i hurt her)

any of it now. Her father was what mattered now. He was slumped over in his TV chair, his face stamped with pain. He was paper white. His eyes were bloodshot.

Oh, Daddy,
she thought,
I'd trade even-Steven with you if I could. You've got something that hurts you but it never gets out of its cage. I've got something big that doesn't hurt me at all but oh sometimes I get so scared—

“I've got the money,” she said. “I didn't go to all the telephones, because the bag was getting heavy and I was afraid it would break.” She looked at him anxiously. “Where can we go, Daddy? You have to lie down.”

Andy reached into the bag and slowly began to transfer the change in handfuls to the pockets of his corduroy coat. He wondered if this night would ever end. He wanted to do nothing more than grab another cab and go into town and
check them into the first hotel or motel in sight … but he was afraid. Cabs could be traced. And he had a strong feeling that the people from the green car were still close behind.

He tried to put together what he knew about the Albany airport. First of all, it was the Albany County Airport; it really wasn't in Albany at all but in the town of Colonie. Shaker country—hadn't his grandfather told him once that this was Shaker country? Or had all of them died out now? What about highways? Turnpikes? The answer came slowly. There was a road … some sort of Way. Northway or Southway, he thought.

He opened his eyes and looked at Charlie. “Can you walk aways, kiddo? Couple of miles, maybe?”

“Sure.” She had slept and felt relatively fresh. “Can you?”

That was the question. He didn't know. “I'm going to try,” he said. “I think we ought to walk out to the main road and try to catch a ride, hon.”

“Hitchhike?” she asked.

He nodded. “Tracing a hitchhiker is pretty hard, Charlie. If we're lucky, we'll get a ride with someone who'll be in Buffalo by morning.” And if we're not, we'll still be standing in the breakdown lane with our thumbs out when that green car comes rolling up.

“If you think it's okay,” Charlie said doubtfully.

“Come on,” he said, “help me.”

Gigantic bolt of pain as he got to his feet He swayed a little, closed his eyes, then opened them again. People looked surreal. Colors seemed too bright. A woman walked by on high heels, and every click on the airport tiles was the sound of a vault door being slammed.

“Daddy, are you sure you can?” Her voice was small and very scared.

Charlie. Only Charlie looked right.

“I think I can,” he said. “Come on.”

They left by a different door from the one they had entered, and the skycap who had noticed them getting out of the cab was busy unloading suitcases from the trunk of a car. He didn't see them go out.

“Which way, Daddy?” Charlie asked.

He looked both ways and saw the Northway, curving away below and to the right of the terminal building. How to get there, that was the question. There were roads everywhere—overpasses, underpasses,
NO RIGHT TURN, STOP ON SIGNAL,
KEEP LEFT, NO PARKING ANYTIME
. Traffic signals flashing in the early-morning blackness like uneasy spirits.

“This way, I think,” he said, and they walked the length of the terminal beside the feeder road that was lined with
LOADING AND UNLOADING ONLY
signs. The sidewalk ended at the end of the terminal. A large silver Mercedes swept by them indifferently, and the reflected glow of the overhead sodium arcs on its surface made him wince.

Charlie was looking at him questioningly.

Andy nodded. “Just keep as far over to the side as you can. Are you cold?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Thank goodness it's a warm night. Your mother would—”

His mouth snapped shut over that.

The two of them walked off into darkness, the big man with the broad shoulders and the little girl in the red pants and the green blouse, holding his hand, almost seeming to lead him.

The green car showed up about fifteen minutes later and parked at the yellow curb. Two men got out, the same two who had chased Andy and Charlie to the cab back in Manhattan. The driver sat behind the wheel.

An airport cop strolled up. “You can't park here, sir,” he said. “If you'll just pull up to—”

“Sure I can,” the driver said. He showed the cop his ID. The airport cop looked at it, looked at the driver, looked back at the picture on the ID.

“Oh,” he said. “I'm sorry, sir. Is it something we should know about?”

“Nothing that affects airport security,” the driver said, “but maybe you can help. Have you seen either of these two people tonight?” He handed the airport cop a picture of Andy, and then a fuzzy picture of Charlie. Her hair had been longer then. In the snap, it was braided into pigtails. Her mother had been alive then. “The girl's a year or so older now,” the driver said. “Her hair's a bit shorter. About to her shoulders.”

The cop examined the pictures carefully, shuffling them back and forth. “You know, I believe I did see this little
girl,” he said. “Towhead, isn't she? Picture makes it a little hard to tell.”

“Towhead, right.”

“The man her father?”

“Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.”

The airport cop felt a wave of dislike for the blank-faced young man behind the wheel of the nondescript green car. He had had peripheral doings with the FBI, the CIA, and the outfit they called the Shop before. Their agents were all the same, blankly arrogant and patronizing. They regarded anyone in a bluesuit as a kiddy cop. But when they'd had the hijacking here five years ago, it had been the kiddy cops who got the guy, loaded down with grenades, off the plane, and he had been in the custody of the “real” cops when he committed suicide by opening up his carotid artery with his own fingernails. Nice going, guys.

“Look … sir. I asked if the man was her father to try and find out if there's a family resemblance. Those pictures make it a little hard to tell.”

“They look a bit alike. Different hair colors.”

That much I can see for myself, you asshole,
the airport cop thought. “I saw them both,” the cop told the driver of the green car. “He's a big guy, bigger than he looks in that picture. He looked sick or something.”

“Did he?” The driver seemed pleased.

“We've had a big night here, all told. Some fool also managed to light his own shoes on fire.”

The driver sat bolt upright behind the wheel. “Say
what?
”

The airport cop nodded, happy to have got through the driver's bored façade. He would not have been so happy if the driver had told him he had just earned himself a debriefing in the Shop's Manhattan offices. And Eddie Delgardo probably would have beaten the crap out of him, because instead of touring the singles bars (and the massage parlors, and the Times Square porno shops) during the Big Apple segment of his leave, he was going to spend most of it in a drug-induced state of total recall, describing over and over again what had happened before and just after his shoes got hot.

The other two men from the green sedan were talking to airport personnel. One of them discovered the skycap who had noticed Andy and Charlie getting out of the cab and going into the terminal.

“Sure I saw them. I thought it was a pure-d shame, a man as drunk as that having a little girl out that late.”

“Maybe they took a plane,” one of the men suggested.

“Maybe so,” the skycap agreed. “I wonder what that child's mother can be thinking of. I wonder if she knows what's going on.”

“I doubt if she does,” the man in the dark-blue Botany 500 suit said. He spoke with great sincerity. “You didn't see them leave?”

“No, sir. Far as I know, they're still round here somewhere … unless their flight's been called, of course.”

The two men made a quick sweep through the main terminal and then through the boarding gates, holding their IDs up in their cupped hands for the security cops to see. They met near the United Airlines ticket desk.

“Dry,” the first said.

“Think they took a plane?” the second asked. He was the fellow in the nice blue Botany 500.

“I don't think that bastard had more than fifty bucks to his name … maybe a whole lot less than that.”

“We better check it.”

“Yeah. But quick.”

United Airlines. Allegheny. American. Braniff. The commuter airlines. No broad-shouldered man who looked sick had bought tickets. The baggage handler at Albany Airlines thought he had seen a little girl in red pants and a green shirt, though. Pretty blond hair, shoulder-length.

The two of them met again near the TV chairs where Andy and Charlie had been sitting not long ago. “What do you think?” the first asked.

The agent in the Botany 500 looked excited. “I think we ought to blanket the area,” he said. “I think they're on foot.”

They headed back to the green car, almost trotting.

Andy and Charlie walked on through the dark along the soft shoulder of the airport feeder road. An occasional car swept by them. It was almost one o'clock. A mile behind them, in the terminal, the two men had rejoined their third partner at the green car. Andy and Charlie were now walking parallel to the Northway, which was to their right and below them, lit by the depthless glare of sodium lights. It might be possible to scramble down the embankment and try to thumb a ride in the breakdown lane, but if a cop came along, that would end whatever poor chance they still had to get away. Andy was wondering how far they would have to walk before they came to a ramp. Each time his foot came down, it generated a thud that resounded sickly in his head.

“Daddy? Are you still okay?”

“So far, so good,” he said, but he was not so very okay. He wasn't fooling himself, and he doubted if he was fooling Charlie.

“How much further is it?”

“Are you getting tired?”

“Not yet … but Daddy …”

He stopped and looked solemnly down at her. “What is it, Charlie?”

“I feel like those bad men are around again,” she whispered.

“All right,” he said. “I think we better just take a shortcut, honey. Can you get down that hill without falling?”

She looked at the grade, which was covered with dead October grass.

“I guess so,” she said doubtfully.

He stepped over the guardrail cables and then helped Charlie over. As it sometimes did in moments of extreme pain and stress, his mind attempted to flee into the past, to get away from the stress. There had been some good years, some good times, before the shadow began to steal gradually over their lives—first just over him and Vicky, then over all
three, blotting out their happiness a little at a time, as inexorably as a lunar eclipse. It had been—

“Daddy!”
Charlie called in sudden alarm. She had lost her footing. The dry grass was slippery, treacherous. Andy grabbed for her flailing arm, missed, and overbalanced himself. The thud as he hit the ground caused such pain in his head that he cried out loud. Then they were both rolling and sliding down the embankment toward the Northway where the cars rushed past, much too fast to stop if one of them—he or Charlie—should tumble out onto the pavement.

The GA looped a piece of rubber flex around Andy's arm just above the elbow and said, “Make a fist, please.” Andy did. The vein popped up obligingly. He looked away, feeling a little ill. Two hundred dollars or not, he had no urge to watch the IV set in place.

Vicky Tomlinson was on the next cot, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and dove-gray slacks. She offered him a strained smile. He thought again what beautiful auburn hair she had, how well it went with her direct blue eyes … then the prick of pain, followed by dull heat, in his arm.

“There,” the grad assistant said comfortingly.