Strangers (80 page)

Alarmed by talk of weapons and shootouts, Wilkerson had humored Cal and, as soon as the man left, had called his sister. Nan Gilchrist had arrived at half-past-ten with her husband and had told a worried Wilkerson that she would handle it, that she was sure she could persuade Cal to enter the hospital for observation. But after she and Mr. Gilchrist went into the house, Ed Wilkerson decided they might need some backup, so he and another neighbor, Frank Krelky, went to the Sharkle house to provide what assistance they could.

Wilkerson expected Mr. or Mrs. Gilchrist to answer the bell, but Cal himself came to the door. He was distraught, nearly hysterical—and armed with a .20-gauge semiautomatic shotgun. He accused his neighbors of being zombies already. “You’ve been
changed,
” he shouted at Wilkerson and Krelky. “Oh God, I should’ve seen it. I should’ve known. When did it happen, when’d you stop being human? My God, now you’ve come to get us all in one swoop.” Then, with a wail of terror, he opened fire with the shotgun. The first blast took Krelky in the throat at such close range that it decapitated him. Wilkerson ran, was hit in the legs as he reached the end of Sharkle’s front walk, fell, rolled, and played dead, a ruse that saved his life.

Now Krelky was in the morgue, and Wilkerson was in the hospital in good enough condition to talk to reporters.

And Father Wycazik was at the entrance to O’Bannon Lane, where a young man in the crowd behind the police line was eager to fill in the last of it for him. The man’s name was Roger Hasterwick, a “temporarily unemployed beverage concoctionist,” which Stefan suspected was an out-of-work bartender. He had a disturbing gleam in his eyes that might have been a sign of intoxication, drug use, lack of sleep, psychopathy, or all four, but his information was detailed and apparently accurate:

“So, see, the cops close the block, evacuate the people out their houses, then they try to talk with this Sharkle the Shark. But he don’t have a phone, see, and when they use a bullhorn, he won’t answer them. The cops figure his sister and brother-in-law are in there alive, hostages, so nobody wants to do nothin’ rash.”

“Wise,” Father Wycazik said bleakly, feeling even colder than the winter day in which he stood.

“Wise, wise, wise,” Roger Hasterwick said impatiently, making it clear he preferred not to be interrupted. “So finally, with a half-hour daylight left, they decide they’ll send in the SWAT guys to dig him out, maybe save the sister and brother-in-law. So they lob tear gas in there, see, and the SWAT guys rush the place, but when they get in they hit trouble. Sharkle must’ve been workin’ on the house for weeks, settin’ traps. The cops start fallin’ over these thin wires he’s strung everywhere, and one gets brained by a deadfall, which don’t kill him but sure does some damage. Then, Christ, Sharkle opens fire on ’em because he’s wearin’ a gas mask same as they are and just waitin’ like a cat. The dude was
prepared.
So he blows one cop away, utterly, and wounds one, then he heads down into the cellar and pulls the door shut, and nobody can get in after him ’cause it’s not any regular cellar door but a
steel
door he’s put in special. Not only that, but the outside cellar door, around back, is steel, too, and what he’s done is he’s put heavy sheet-metal shutters over the insides of the cellar windows, so it’s your typical stalemate, see.”

By Stefan’s calculations, two people were dead, three wounded.

Hasterwick said, “So the cops they pulled in their horns real fast and figured to wait him out through the night. This mornin’, Sharkle the Shark slides open one of them sheet-metal shutters on a basement window, see, and he shouts a bunch of stuff, really crazy stuff, and they figure somethin’ more is gonna go down, but then he closes the shutter again, and since then—nothin’. I sure hope he does somethin’ soon, ’cause it’s cold and I’m beginnin’ to get bored.”

“What did he shout?” Stefan asked.

“Huh?”

“This morning, what crazy stuff did he yell from the basement?”

“Oh, well, see, what he says…” Roger Hasterwick stopped when he realized that a piece of news, passing in from the edge of the crowd, had electrified everyone. People hurried away from the barricade, some walking fast and some running south on Scott Avenue. Appalled by the prospect of missing new bloodshed, Hasterwick grabbed frantically at a blotchy-faced man in a deerstalker cap, the flaps of which were down but flopping loose. “What is it? What’s happenin’?”

Trying to pull away from Hasterwick, the man in the deerstalker cap said, “Guy down here has a van with his own police-band radio. He’s tuned in on the cops, the SWAT team, they’re getting ready to wipe that fuckin’ Sharkle off the map!” He wrenched loose of Hasterwick and rushed away, and Hasterwick hurried after him.

Father Wycazik stared after the departing throng for a moment. Then he glanced around at the ten or twelve onlookers who had remained, at the officers manning the barricade, past the barricade. More death, murder. He could sense it coming. He should do something to stop it. But he could not think. He was numb with dread. Until now, he had seen—and been
able
to see—only a positive side to the unfolding mystery. The miraculous cures and other phenomena had engendered only joy and an expectation of divine revelations to come. But now he was seeing the dark side of the mystery, and he was badly shaken by it.

Finally, hoping he would not be mistaken for just another ghoul in the bloodthirsty crowd, Stefan hurried after Roger Hasterwick and the others. They had gathered almost a block south of O’Bannon Lane, around a recreational van, a metallic-blue Chevrolet with a California-beach mural on the side. The owner, a huge and hugely bearded man sitting behind the wheel, had opened both doors and turned up the volume on the police-band radio, so everyone could hear the cops in action.

In a minute or two, the essentials of their attack plan were clear. The SWAT team was already moving into place, back into the first floor of Sharkle’s house. They would use a small, precisely shaped charge of plastic explosives to blow the steel cellar door off its pins, not enough to send shrapnel cutting through the basement. Simultaneously, another group of officers would blow off the exterior cellar door with a similar carefully gauged charge. Even as the smoke was clearing, the two groups would storm into the basement and catch Cal Sharkle in a pincer attack. That strategy was terribly dangerous for the officers and the hostages, though the authorities had decided that they would be in far greater danger if action was delayed any further.

Listening to the radio-relayed voices crackle in the cold January air, Father Wycazik suddenly knew he must stop the attack. If it was carried
out, the slaughter would be worse than anyone imagined. He had to be allowed to go past the barricade, to the house, and talk to Cal Sharkle. Now. Right away.
Now.
He turned from the Chevy van and raced back toward the entrance to O’Bannon Lane, a block away. He was not sure what he would say to Sharkle to get through his paranoia. Perhaps, “You are not alone, Calvin.” He’d think of something.

His abrupt departure from the van apparently gave the crowd the idea that he had heard or seen something happening up at the barricade. He was less than halfway back to the entrance to O’Bannon Lane when younger and fleeter onlookers began to pass him, shouting excitedly, plunging off the sidewalk and out into the street, bringing a complete halt to the already crawling traffic on Scott Avenue. Brakes barked. Horns blew. There was the thud of one bumper hitting another. Stefan was jostled by runners and struck so hard that he fell to his hands and knees on the pavement. No one stopped to help him. Stefan got up and ran on. The air seemed to have thickened with animal madness and bloodlust. Stefan was horrified at the behavior of his fellow men, and his heart was pounding, and he thought,
This is what it might be like in Hell, running forever in the midst of a frantic and gibbering mob.

By the time Stefan reached the police blockade, more than half the frenzied crowd had returned ahead of him. They were jammed against the sawhorses and police cars, craning to see into the forbidden block of O’Bannon Lane. He pushed in among them, desperate to get to the head of the mob, so he could speak to the police. He was pushed, shoved, but he shoved back, telling them he was a priest, but no one was listening, and he felt his fedora knocked off his head, but he persisted, and then at last he was through to the front of the surging multitudes.

The policemen angrily ordered the mob to move back, threatened arrest, drew batons, lowered the visors on their riot helmets. Father Wycazik was prepared to lie, to tell the police anything that might get them to postpone the imminent attack on the house, tell them that he was not just a priest but Sharkle’s own priest, that he knew what was wrong, knew how to get Sharkle to surrender. Of course, he didn’t really know how to obtain Sharkle’s surrender, but if he could buy time and talk to Sharkle, he might think of something. He caught the attention of an officer who ordered him to step back. He identified himself as a priest. The cop wasn’t listening, so Stefan tore open his topcoat and pulled off his white scarf to reveal his Roman collar. “I’m a priest!” But the crowd surged forward, pushing Stefan against a sawhorse, and the barrier fell over, and the cop shoved back angrily, in no mood to listen.

An instant later, two small explosions shook the air, one a split-second after the other, low and flat but hard. The hundred voices of the crowd
gasped as one, and everybody froze, for they knew what they had heard: the SWAT team blowing the steel doors off the cellar. A third explosion followed the first two, an immense and devastating blast that shook the pavement, that hurt the ears, that vibrated in bones and teeth, that shot slabs and splinters of Sharkle’s house into the wintry sky, that seemed to shatter the day itself and cast it down in a billion broken pieces. Again with a single voice, the crowd cried out. Instead of pressing toward the blockade this time, they scrambled back in fear, suddenly realizing that death could be not just an interesting spectator sport but a participatory activity.

“He had a bomb!” one of the barricade cops said. “My God, my God, Sharkle had a bomb in there!” He turned to the emergency medical van in which two paramedics were waiting, and he shouted, “Go!
Go!
”

The red beacons flashed atop the paramedic’s wagon. It pulled out of the barricade, speeding toward the middle of the block.

Shaking with horror, Father Wycazik tried to follow on foot. But one of the cops grabbed him and said, “Hey, get the hell back there.”

“I’m a priest. Someone may need comforting, last rites.”

“Father, I wouldn’t care if you were the pope himself. We don’t know for sure that Sharkle’s dead.”

Numbly, Father Wycazik obeyed, though the tremendous power of the explosion left no doubt in his mind that Cal Sharkle was dead. Sharkle
and
his sister. And his brother-in-law. And most members of the SWAT team. How many altogether? Maybe five? Six? Ten?

Moving aimlessly back through the crowd, absentmindedly tucking his scarf in place and buttoning his coat, partially in a state of shock, murmuring a
Pater Noster,
he saw Roger Hasterwick, the unemployed bartender with the queerly gleaming eyes. He put a hand on Hasterwick’s shoulder, and said, “What did he shout to the police this morning?”

Hasterwick blinked. “Huh? What?”

“Before we got separated, you told me Calvin Sharkle slid open the metal shutter on one of the cellar windows and shouted a lot of weird stuff this morning, and you thought something was going to happen, but then nothing did. What exactly did he say?”

Hasterwick’s face brightened with the memory. “Oh, yeah, yeah. It was real weird, see, straight-out crazy stuff.” He scrunched up his face, striving to recall the madman’s exact words. When he had them, he grinned, rolled his mouth as if savoring the revelation, then repeated Sharkle’s ravings for Stefan’s enjoyment.

Stefan not only failed to enjoy the performance, but second by dreadful second, he became increasingly convinced that Calvin Sharkle had not been insane. Confused, yes, baffled and afraid because of the tremendous stress generated by his brainwashing and by the collapse of his memory
blocks, badly confused but not insane. Roger Hasterwick and everyone else thought Sharkle’s shouted accusations and declarations and imprecations, flung at the world through the shielded window of a jerry-built fortress, were obviously the lunatic fantasies of a demented mind. But Father Wycazik had an advantage over everyone else: He saw Sharkle’s statements in the context of events at the Tranquility Motel, in the context of miracle cures and telekinetic phenomena, and he wondered if there might be some truth in the claims and accusations that the poor frightened man had shouted through the basement window. And wondering, he felt the fine hairs rise on the back of his neck. He shivered.

Seeing that reaction, Hasterwick said, “Hey, ain’t no point takin’ it serious, for Christ’s sake. You don’t think what he said was true? Hell, the guy was a nut. He blowed himself up, didn’t he?”

Father Wycazik ran north along Scott Avenue to the parish car.

Even before he had arrived in Evanston and discovered the unfolding tragedy at Calvin Sharkle’s house, Stefan Wycazik had half-expected to be on a flight to Nevada before the day was through. The events at the Mendozas’ apartment and at the Halbourgs’ place had set a fire of wonder and curiosity burning in him, and the blaze would not be quenched unless he plunged into the activities of the troubled group in Elko County.

Now, because of what he had just learned from Hasterwick, the urge to go to Nevada had become a burning need. If only half of what Sharkle had shouted through the basement window was true, Stefan
had
to go to Nevada, not only to witness a miracle but to do what he could to protect those who had gathered at the Tranquility. All his life, he had been a rescuer of troubled priests, a shepherd bringing lost souls back into the fold. This time, however, he might be called upon to save minds and lives as well. The threat of which Calvin Sharkle had spoken was one that might put body and brain in as much jeopardy as the spirit.