If You Could See Me Now (13 page)

With these thoughts in my mind, I started when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw only an empty street lined with cars like the deserted hulls of insects. When I turned my neck, I again heard the footsteps, a crowd of them. I began to walk quickly, and heard them follow. The street lay wide and deserted before me, lined with empty cars and blank deserted shops. I heard the electric buzz of a neon sign in the window of a kitchen supplier's. Reality's veneer seemed on the verge of dissolution, even the pavement and the brick storefronts were stretched taut over a drumming void. I began to run, and heard them running behind me. I turned my head again, and was almost relieved to see a crowd of thick-waisted men making down the street toward me.

The courthouse was four blocks away, in a straight line up Main Street, but I didn't have a chance of getting there before they caught me. In the brief glimpse I had, some of them seemed to be carrying sticks. I pumped around the next corner and doubled back into an alley. When I reached the rear of Freebo's I hunched down beside a group of large silver garbage cans; I did not have time to reach the end of the alley.
The group of men had clearly divided; two of them appeared at the alley's entrance and began to half-trot toward me. I crouched as low as I could get behind the big silver cans. Their footsteps approached, and I heard them breathing hard. They were even less accustomed to running than I was.

One of them distinctly exclaimed, “Shit.”

I waited until I heard them returning; they passed my hole, and then clattered toward the alley's entrance. When I peeked out, I saw them turning right to follow the rest of the group. My back to the buildings, legs ready to spring, I edged down the alley's length. I looked cautiously out at Madison Street. Two blocks down, they were rocking an old car parked before a peeling, shabby house. One of them swung at the car with a long stick, ax handle or baseball bat. Glass popped and exploded.

I couldn't make sense of it. Were they just rowdy drunks looking for the nearest target? Hoping that the noise they were making while destroying the car would keep them from hearing me, I ran across Madison Street into the alley on the other side. Shouts and yells told me that they had seen me. I nearly fell down in terror. I pelted through the alley and came out on Monroe Street, turned right with the thick boiling noise gathering behind me, and wheeled around the corner back onto Main. At the last possible second, I yanked at the door handle of a car and rolled inside. Then I scrambled over the seat and lay, heart pounding, in the well before the back seat. A candy wrapper fluttered before my nose; dust seemed to pour dryly up from the floor, acrid and foul. I closed my nostrils with my fingers, and after a time the impulse to sneeze left me. I could hear them coming quickly up the street, banging with fists or clubs on cars in frustration.

The edge of a greasy shirt passed the window I could see.
A hand pressed against it, flattened and white like a dead starfish. Then I saw only darkening sky. I thought: what if I die here? If my machinery fails and dumps my corpse into this odorous car? Who would find me? It was an image of utter hopelessness. After a while I was strong enough to sneak a look over the top of the seat. They were not far down the block, evidently confounded by my disappearance. There were only four of them, fewer than I had thought; they did not look like the men who had stoned me. They were younger. They ran ahead a few steps. Then they began to walk up Main, looking from side to side, rapping their bats on the sidewalk. They were the only people on the street. When a car passed, they bent to examine the driver's face. I waited until they had gone several blocks past the courthouse and then I crawled over the seat and came crouching out onto the sidewalk.

The four men were across the street now, far up ahead, nearly to the bridge over the Blundell River. The courthouse lay about halfway between us. I began to walk toward it. The men had reached the bridge, and I saw them leaning on it, talking, lighting cigarettes. Bent over, moving as quickly as possible without running, I gained another fifty feet. Then one of the men threw down his cigarette and pointed at me.

I lifted my elbows and knees and discovered for the first time in my life what running was. It is rhythm, all rhythm, long easy beats made by coordinating every muscle. They were confused that I ran toward them, but when I reached the courthouse and turned easily on one leg and pounded, stepping high, to the back, they flew shouting after me. I fisted my hands and made arcs in the air with them, my chest bowed out and my legs sailing across the asphalt parking lot. I reached the police cars just as they came into the lot. I heard them slow down, scuffling, calling out to me.

The words were inaudible. A roaring sound kicked to life in the corner of the parking lot, and I saw a black-jacketed man tear off on a motorcycle. It looked as though it could have been Zack; I wasn't sure. The sudden noise made my followers panic. By the time I reached the yellow door with thick glass inset above the word
POLICE
, they had scattered. My throat felt like burning paper.

The uniformed man rolling a sheet of paper into a typewriter turned his chubby face toward me. I closed the door and leaned back against it, breathing hard. Still holding the paper in his hands, he half-rose, and I saw the stumpy pistol strapped to his hip. “My name is Teagarden,” I said, “and I have an appointment with the Chief.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and lowered the paper with deliberate slowness on top of the typewriter. My chest was heaving.

“I just won a race. Try not to shoot.”

“Just hold it right there.” He came around to the front of the desk, not taking his eyes from me nor removing his hand from within panic distance of the revolver. His left hand found the telephone; when he had the receiver to his ear, he glanced at the row of buttons at the base of the phone and punched one and then dialed a single number. “Teagarden's here.” He set the phone down.

“You can go right in. He's been waiting for you. Take that door right there, and then it's the door marked Chief.”

I nodded, and moved toward the door “right there.” Polar Bears' office was at the end of the hall; it was about ten by twelve, mostly filled with green filing cabinets and a worn old desk. Most of the rest of it was filled by Polar Bears.

“Sit down, for God's sake, Miles,” he said, waving at the chair before his desk. “You look like you had a hard old day.” Looking at him, I could see the difference in our ages more
clearly than I ever had before—he had been nearly Duane's age, though his cheerful rowdiness had made him younger in my eyes. In this solidly massive man with a serious square face I could see few traces of the boy who had spitballed Bertilsson's sheep. Even the reason for his name had vanished: his furry cap of astonishingly white hair had darkened and receded to a brownish dusting from his ears to his rubbery-looking scalp.

“You look like you've had a hard old life, but it's nice to see you again,” I said.

“Yeah, we had some good times together, didn't we? Some real good times.”

“I had an especially good time on the way over here. A gang of your citizens chased me with baseball bats. I barely made it.”

He tilted his head back and pushed his lips out. “Would that be the reason you're sort of late for our reunion?”

“Our reunion is the reason I'm here at all, and not broken up in the alley behind Freebo's. They only stopped chasing me because I made it into your parking lot.”

“You were at Freebo's. I'd say you spent quite a time in there.”

“Does that mean you don't believe me?”

“Some of the bucks around town are getting all riled. I can believe you, Miles. I don't suppose you saw these boys close enough to identify them.”

“I was trying hard not to get that close.”

“Simmer down, Miles. They're not going to get you. You're going to be safe in here, having a little talk. Just simmer down. Those boys will leave you alone.”

“Some others of your local boys threw rocks at me this noon when my back was turned.”

“Is that so? You get hurt any?”

“It's so and no, I didn't. Do you want me to forget about that too? Just because they didn't dent my skull?”

“I don't want you to go getting yourself worked up over a bunch of hotheads. I'd say that some of the good people decided that you'd be better off leaving town.”

“Why?”

“Because they don't know you, Miles. It's simple as that. You're the only man in about a century and a half had a sermon preached about him. You weren't thinking of being run off, were you?”

“No. I have to stay here. I'm involved in something.”

“Um hum. Real good. Any idea how long that might take you?”

“Until the twenty-first. After that I don't know.”

“Well, that's not far away. I want to ask you to consider staying up there at Duane's until we get some things straightened out around here. Is that all right?”

“What the hell is this all about, Polar Bears? Don't leave town until the police give me permission?”

“I wouldn't put it like that. I'm asking you for a favor.”

“Am I being questioned?”

“Hell no, Miles. We're having a talk. I want your help on something.”

I leaned back in the stiff chair. I couldn't feel the alcohol anymore. Galen Hovre was regarding me with a half-smile which held little warmth. My senses were confirming a theory of mine, that when a man's nature changes his essential smell changes with it. Polar Bears once had carried a dense, pleasant odor of closely packed earth, strongest when he was racing a jalopy at seventy down the curves of Highway 93 or stuffing a mailbox with rocks; now, like Duane, he smelled of gunpowder.

“Can I count on your help?”

I looked at this large square-faced man who had been my friend, and didn't trust a thing he said. “Sure.”

“You've heard about these girls who were killed. Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand. Your neighbor Red Sunderson found that Strand girl, and she wasn't a pretty sight. My deputy, Dave Lokken out there, lost his cookies when he saw her.”

“He's still upset,” I said.

“Any normal man would be,” Hovre said amiably. “Truth is, we're all upset around here. This crazy son of a bitch is still walking around. He could be anybody, and that's the one that gets them by the nuts, Miles. We pretty well know everybody, and folks don't know what to think.”

“Don't you have any ideas about who it might be?”

“Oh, we're sort of keeping an eye on someone, but even he's not very likely, according to the way I see it. Now I'd like to keep this local. I've been Chief here for four years, and I want to get reelected so I can keep my family in hamburgers. Now you're new around here. You might see things we don't notice. You had a good education, you're observant. I wonder if you've seen or heard anything that might help me out?”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Do those people who chased me think I did those things? Those killings?”

“You'd have to ask them.”

“Christ,” I said. “I've scarcely even thought about them. I've been busy with my own problems. I didn't come here for this.”

“Seems to me it might help you out too if you could think of anything.”

“I shouldn't need that. I shouldn't have to help myself that way.”

“Seems to me should doesn't have much to do with it.”

He had a point. “Okay, I can see that. I don't think I've noticed anything. Just a lot of people acting queer, afraid. Some
of them hostile. I met one strange kid, but…” The “but” was that I did not want to say anything that would bring suspicion on Zack or Alison. Zack was just a nutty theorist. Polar Bears lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of uninvolved patient anticipation. “But he was just a kid. I don't even want to name him. I don't know what I could say that would help.”

“Not yet, maybe. But you might remember something. Just keep it in mind, will you, old buddy?”

I nodded.

“Yeah. We could have this all on a plate by the twenty-first, so don't do any unnecessary worrying. Now I got a few other little points to bring up with you.” He put on a pair of thick black glasses, making himself look like a scholarly bald bull of melancholy temperament, and took a sheet of paper off a messy pile. “I guess you got into a little trouble over in Plainview a while ago. I got a report on it just yesterday. A fellow named Frank Drum took the number of your car.”

“Jesus,” I said, thinking of the slinking little clerk who had been dispatched out of the diner.

“This was after an incident in Grace's Restaurant over there. Do you remember it?”

“Of course I remember. They were like your gang of happy hooligans who tried to beat in my head with bats.”

“Who chased you.” He looked sharply up from the paper.

“It's the same thing. What happened was ridiculous. I saw these guys listening to a radio and they looked like some trouble had happened and I asked what it was. They didn't like my face. They didn't like my coming from New York. So they threw me out after they took my license number. That was all. It was around one of the day somebody found the first girl.”

“Just for the record, do you know where you spent the previous night?”

“Somewhere. In a motel somewhere. I don't know.”

“You don't have a receipt or a check stub?”

“It was in a crummy little dive off the freeway. I paid with cash. What the hell do you want to know for?”

“I don't want to know. There's a cop named Larabee over there who wanted me to ask, that's all.”

“Well, tell Larabee to shove it up his ass. I was in a crummy motel in Ohio.”

“Just fine, Miles, that's fine. Real good. No need to get lathered up all over again. How did you hurt that hand of yours?”