The Face (32 page)

CHAPTER 51

C
ORKY PARKED ON THE WRONG STREET AND walked two blocks through the cold rain to the home of the three-eyed freak.

Windier than Monday’s storm, this one snapped weak fronds off queen palms, tumbled an empty plastic trash can down the center of the street, tore a window awning and loudly flapped the loose length of forest-green canvas.

Melaleucas lashed their willowy branches as though trying to whip themselves to pieces. Stone pines were stripped of dead brown needles that bristled through the churning air and gave it the power to prick, to blind.

As Corky walked, a dead rat bobbed past him on the racing water in the gutter. The lolling head rolled toward him, revealing one dark empty socket and one milky eye.

The grand and lovely spectacle made him wish that he had time to join in the celebration of disorder, to spread some prankish chaos of his own. He longed to poison a few trees, stuff mailboxes with hate literature, spread nails under the tires of parked cars, set a house afire….

This was a busy day of a different kind, however, and he had numerous scheduled tasks to which he must attend. Monday he had been a devilish rascal, an amusing imp of nihilism, but this day he must be a serious soldier of anarchy.

The neighborhood was an eclectic mix of two-story Craftsman houses with raised front porches and classic single-story California bungalows that borrowed from many styles of architecture. They were maintained with evident pride, enhanced with brick walkways, picket fences, beds of flowers.

By contrast, the bungalow of the three-eyed freak sat behind a half-dead front lawn, skirted by masses of unkempt shrubbery, at the end of a cracked and hoved concrete walkway. Under the Mexican-tile roof, the filthy tangles of long-empty birds’ nests dripped from the eaves, and the stucco walls were cracked, chipped, in need of paint.

The structure looked like the residence of a troll who had grown weary of living under bridges, without amenities, but who had neither the knowledge nor the industry, nor the sense of pride, needed to maintain a house.

Corky rang the doorbell, which produced not sweet chimes but the sputtering racket of a broken, corroded mechanism.

He loved this place.

Because Corky had called ahead and promised money, the three-eyed freak was waiting by the door. He answered the tubercular cough of the bell even before the sound finished grating on Corky’s ear.

Yanking the door open, looming, one great grizzled grimace with a pendulous gut and size-thirteen bare feet, wearing gray sweat pants and a Megadeth concert T-shirt, Ned Hokenberry said, “You look like a damn mustard pot.”

“It’s raining,” Corky observed.

“You look like a pimple on Godzilla’s ass.”

“If you’re worried about getting the carpet wet—”

“Hell, scuzzy as this carpet is, a bunch of pukin’-drunk hobos with bad bladders couldn’t do it any harm.”

Hokenberry turned away, lumbering into the living room. Corky stepped inside and closed the door behind himself.

The carpet looked as if previously it had been wall-to-wall in a barn.

Should the day arrive when mahogany-finish Formica furniture with green-and-blue-striped polyester upholstery became prized by collectors and museums, Hokenberry would be a wealthy man. The two best items in the living room were a recliner littered with crushed corn chips and a big-screen TV.

The small windows were half covered by drapes. No lamps were aglow; only the TV screen cast light.

Corky was comfortable with the gloom. In spite of his affinity for chaos, he hoped never to see the interior of this house in bright light.

“The last batch of information you gave me checks out, as far as I’m able to check it,” Corky said, “and it’s really been helpful.”

“Told you I know the estate better than that candy-ass actor knows his own dick.”

Until he’d been dismissed, with generous severance pay, for leaving prank messages on the answering machine that his employer had dedicated to phone calls from the dead, Ned Hokenberry had been a security guard at Palazzo Rospo.

“You say they got a new security chief. I can’t guarantee he didn’t change some procedures.”

“I understand.”

“You have my twenty thousand?”

“I have it right here.” Corky withdrew his right arm from the voluminous sleeve of the slicker, and reached to an interior pocket for the packet of cash, his second payment to Hokenberry.

Even framed by the snugly buttoned yellow collar of his slicker and the drooping yellow brim of his rain hat, Corky’s face must have revealed more of his contempt than he intended.

Hokenberry’s bloodshot eyes blurred with self-pity, and his doughy face kneaded itself into more and deeper folds as he said, “I wasn’t always a sorry damn wreck, you know. Didn’t used to have this gut. Shaved every day, cleaned up real nice. Front lawn used to be green. Bein’ fired by that son of a bitch is what ruined me.”

“I thought you said Manheim gave you lots of severance pay?”

“That was soul-buyin’ money, I now understand. Anyway, Manheim wasn’t man enough to fire me himself. He had his creepy guru do it.”

“Ming du Lac.”

“That’s the one. Ming, he takes me to the rose garden, pours tea, which I’m polite enough to drink even if it tastes like piss.”

“You’re a gentleman.”

“We’re sittin’ at this table surrounded by roses, got this white lace cloth and fancy china—”

“Sounds lovely.”

“—while he talks at me about gettin’ my spiritual house in order. I’m not just bored shitless, but thinkin’ he’s even a bigger fruitcake than I ever figured, when
after fifteen minutes
I realize I’m bein’ fired. If he’d made that clear at the start, I wouldn’t have had to drink his piss-poor tea.”

“That does sound traumatizing,” Corky said, pretending sympathy.

“It wasn’t traumatizin’, you ass pimple. What do you think I am, some pansy gets his dainties all puckered just ’cause someone looks at him wrong? I wasn’t traumatized, I was
hexed
.”

“Hexed?”

“Hexed, cursed, hoodooed, diabolized, spellcast by the evil eye—whatever you want to call it. Ming du Lac, he’s got hell power in him, the creepy runt, and he ruined me forever in that rose garden. I’ve been slidin’ downhill ever since.”

“He sounds like the usual Hollywood fraud to me.”

“I’m tellin’ you, that little weasel’s the real juju, and I been spell-struck.”

Corky held out the package of cash, but then pulled it back as the hexed wreckage of a man reached for it. “One more thing.”

“Don’t screw with me,” Hokenberry said, hulking over Corky and glowering as if he’d come down a beanstalk, angry and looking for whoever had stolen his hen’s eggs.

“You’ll get your money,” Corky assured him. “I’d just like to hear how you acquired your third eye.”

Hokenberry had only two eyes of his own, but around his neck, on a pendant, hung the eye of a stranger.

“I already told you twice how I got it.”

“I just like to hear it,” Corky said. “You tell it so well. It tickles me.”

Scrunching his face until he resembled a Shar-Pei, Hokenberry considered the concept of himself as a raconteur, and he seemed to like it. “Twenty-five years ago, I started doin’ road security for rock groups, tour security. I don’t mean I planned it or managed it. That’s not my zone.”

“You’ve always been just beef,” Corky said, anticipating him.

“Yeah, I’ve always been just beef, been out front to intimidate the crazier fans, the totally wired meth freaks and PCP spongebrains. Been beef for Rollin’ Stones tours, Megadeth, Metallica, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Meat Loaf, Pink Floyd—”

“Queen, Kiss,” Corky added, “even for Michael Jackson when he still was Michael Jackson.”

“—Michael Jackson back when he still was Michael Jackson if he ever really was,” Hokenberry agreed. “Anyway I had this three-week gig with…My memory’s fuzzy about this. I think it was either the Eagles or could’ve been Peaches and Herb.”

“Or it could’ve been the Captain and Tennille.”

“Yeah, it could’ve been. One of them three acts. This crowd gets all jammed up, gonads gone nuclear, too much of some bad juice bein’ toked and poked that night.”

“You could feel they might rush the stage.”

“I could feel they might rush the stage. All you need is one idiot punk with spunk for brains, he decides to bolt for the band, and he starts a riot.”

“You’ve got to anticipate him,” Corky encouraged.

“Anticipate him, put him down like the
instant
he makes his move, or another two hundred headcases will follow him.”

“So this punk with blue hair—”

“Who’s tellin’ this story?” Hokenberry grumbled. “Me or you?”

“You are. It’s your story. I love this story.”

To express his disgust with these interruptions, Hokenberry spat on the carpet. “So this punk with blue hair tenses to make his move, gonna climb the stage, try to get to Peaches and Herb—”

“Or the Captain.”

“Or Tennille. So I call him out, move in on him fast, and the little butthead flips me the finger, which gives me absolute license to pop him.” Hokenberry raised one fist the size of a ham. “I planted Bullwinkle as deep in his face as it would go.”

“You call your right fist Bullwinkle.”

“Yeah, and my left is Rocky. Didn’t even need Rocky. Bullwinkled him so hard one of his eyes popped out. Startled me, but I caught it in midair. Glass eye. The punk went down cold, and I kept the eye, had it made into this pendant.”

“It’s a terrific pendant.”

“Glass eyes aren’t really glass, you know. They’re thin plastic shells, and the iris is hand-painted on the inside. Way cool.”

“Way,” Corky agreed.

“Had an artist friend make this little glass sphere to hold the eye, stop it deteriorating. That’s the story, gimme my twenty grand.”

Corky passed to him the plastic-wrapped packet of cash.

As he had done with his initial twenty thousand on the first of their three previous meetings, Hokenberry turned away from Corky and took the bundle to the table in the adjacent dinette area to count every crisp hundred-dollar bill.

Corky shot him three times in the back.

When Hokenberry hit the floor, the bungalow shook.

The big man’s fall was much louder than the shots because the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor that Corky had purchased from an anarchic survivalist with deep ties to an aggressive group of anti-veal activists who manufactured the suppressors both for their own use and as a fund-raising activity. Each of the shots made a quiet sound like someone pronouncing the word
supper
with a lisp.

This was the weapon with which he had shot Rolf Reynerd’s mother in the foot.

Considering Hokenberry’s intimidating size, Corky hadn’t trusted the ice pick to do the job.

He moved closer to the beef and shot him three more times, just to be certain no punch remained in Rocky and Bullwinkle.

CHAPTER 52

T
WO WINDOWS PRESENTED A SOLVENT SKY AND a city dissolving in drips, drizzles, and vapors.

Most of the large records room at Our Lady of Angels was divided into aisles by tall banks of filing cabinets. Near the windows lay a more open area with four work stations, and people were busy at two.

Dr. O’Brien settled at one of the unused stations and switched on the computer. Ethan pulled up a chair beside him.

Inserting a DVD into the computer, the physician said, “Mr. Whistler began to experience difficulty breathing three days ago. He needed to be put on a ventilator, and he was moved into the intensive care unit.”

When the DVD was accessed, W
HISTLER,
D
UNCAN
E
UGENE
appeared on the screen with Dunny’s patient number and other vital information that had been collected by the admissions office.

“While he was in the ICU,” O’Brien continued, “his respiration, heartbeat, and brain function were continuously monitored and sent by telemetry to the unit nurses’ station. That’s always been standard procedure.” He used the mouse to click on a series of icons and numbered choices. “The rest is relatively new. The system digitally records data collected by the electronic monitoring devices during the patient’s entire stay in the ICU. For later review.”

Ethan figured they kept a digital record as evidence to defend against frivolous lawsuits.

“Here’s Whistler’s EEG when first admitted to the ICU at four-twenty
P.M.
last Friday.”

An unseen stylus drew a continuous line left to right across an endlessly scrolling graph.

“These are the brain’s electrical impulses as measured in microvolts,” O’Brien continued.

A monotonous series of peaks and valleys depicted Dunny’s brain activity. The peaks were low and wide; the valleys were comparatively steep and narrow.

“Delta waves are the typical pattern of normal sleep,” O’Brien explained. “These are delta waves but not those associated with an ordinary night’s rest. These peaks are broader and much lower than common delta waves, with a smoother oscillation into and out of the troughs. The electrical impulses are few in number, attenuated, weak. This is Whistler in a deep coma. Okay. Now let’s fast-forward to the evening of the day before his death.”

“Sunday night.”

“Yes.”

On the screen, as hours of monitoring flew past in a minute, the uncommon delta waves blurred and jumped slightly, but only slightly because the variation from wave to wave was minuscule. An hour of compressed data, viewed in seconds, closely resembled any minute of the same data studied in real time.

Indeed, the sameness of the patterns was so remarkable that Ethan would not have realized how many hours—days—of data were streaming by if there hadn’t been a time display on the screen.

“The event occurred at one minute before midnight, Sunday,” O’Brien said.

He clicked back to real-time display, and the fast-forwarding stopped at 11:23:22, Sunday night. He speeded the data again in two quick spurts, until he reached 11:58:09.

“Less than a minute now.”

Ethan found himself leaning forward in his chair.

Shatters of rain clattered against the windowpanes, as though the wind, in wounded anger, had spat out broken teeth.

One of the people at the other work stations had left the room.

The remaining woman murmured into her phone. Her voice was soft, singsong, slightly spooky, as might be the voices that left messages on the answering machine that served Line 24.

“Here,” said Dr. O’Brien.

At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.

“These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.”

“What stimulus?” Ethan asked.

“Something he sees, hears, feels.”

“External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma?”

“This isn’t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.”

“And it’s a machine malfunction?”

“A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But…”

“You disagree.”

O’Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. “Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. First…when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he’d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.”

“Could he have been dreaming?” Ethan asked.

O’Brien shook his head emphatically. “The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.”

The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.

“The nurse summoned a doctor,” O’Brien said. “That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.”

“And you said ‘disturbed.’”

The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.

“At some points you might accurately say he appears ‘disturbed,’ at others ‘excited,’ and in this passage you’re watching now, I’d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.”

“Terrified?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Nightmare?” Ethan suggested.

“A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they’re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.”

O’Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes’ worth in a few seconds.

When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, “This looks the same…yet different.”

“These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightened, although the terror may have declined here to high anxiety.”

The serpent-voiced wind, singing in a language of hiss-shriek-moan, and the claw-tap of rain on window glass seemed to be the perfect music to accompany the jagged images on the screen.

“Although the overall pattern remains one of conscious anxiety,” Dr. O’Brien continued, “within it are these irregular subsets of higher spikes, each followed by a subset of lower spikes.”

He pointed at the screen, calling examples to Ethan’s attention.

“I see them,” Ethan said. “What do they mean?”

“They’re indicative of conversation.”

“Conversation? He’s talking to himself?”

“First of all, he isn’t talking
aloud
to anyone, not even to himself, so we shouldn’t be seeing these patterns.”

“I understand. I think.”

“But what these represent is not arguable. During the subsets of higher spikes, the subject should be speaking. During the subsets of lower spikes, he should be listening. A subject having a bit of
mental
give-and-take with himself, even when he’s awake, produces no such subsets. After all, for one thing, when you’re talking to yourself, conducting a little interior debate—”

“Technically, you’re always talking,” Ethan said. “You’re both sides of the debate. You’re never really listening.”

“Exactly. These subsets are indicative of
conscious
conversation between this individual and another person.”

“What other person?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s in a coma.”

“Yes.”

Frowning, Ethan said, “Then how is he talking to anyone? By telepathy?”

“Do we believe in telepathy?” O’Brien asked.

“I don’t.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then why couldn’t this be a malfunctioning machine?” Ethan wondered.

O’Brien accelerated the data flow until the brain-wave patterns disappeared from the screen, replaced by the words D
ATA
I
NTERRUPT.

“They took Whistler off the EEG, the one they thought must be malfunctioning,” the doctor said. “They connected him to a different machine. The switchover took six minutes.”

He fast-forwarded through the gap, until the patterns appeared once more.

“They look the same on the new machine,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, they are. Beta waves representing consciousness, lots of anxiety, and with subsets suggesting vigorous conversation.”

“A second malfunctioning machine?”

“There’s one holdout who still thinks so. Not me. These wave patterns ran nineteen minutes on the first EEG, apparently for six minutes between hookups, and then thirty-one minutes on the second machine. Fifty-six minutes total before they abruptly stopped.”

“How do you explain it?” Ethan asked.

Instead of answering him, O’Brien worked the keyboard, calling up a second display of data, which appeared above the first: another moving white line on the blue background, spiking from left to right. In this case, all the spikes were above the base line, none below.

“This is Whistler’s respiration synchronized with the brain-wave data,” O’Brien said. “Each spike is an inhalation. Exhalation takes place between spikes.”

“Very regular.”

“Very. Because the ventilator is breathing for him.”

The physician tapped the keys again, and a third display shared the screen with the first two.

“This is heart function. Standard three-phase action. Diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole. Slow but not too slow. Weak but not too weak. Slight irregularities, but nothing dangerous. Now look here at the brain waves.”

The beta waves were doing the earthquake jitterbug once more.

Ethan said, “He’s terrified again.”

“In my opinion, yes. Yet there’s no change in heart function. It’s the same slow, somewhat weak beat with tolerable irregularities, exactly his deep-coma pattern ever since he was first admitted to the hospital almost three months ago. He’s in a state of terror…yet his heart is calm.”

“The heart’s calm because he’s comatose. Right?”

“Wrong. Even in a profound coma, Mr. Truman, there isn’t this complete disconnect between the mind and body. When you’re having a nightmare, the terror is imagined, not real, but heart function is affected just the same. The heart races during a nightmare.”

For a moment, Ethan studied the violently jumping beta waves and compared them to the slow, steady heartbeat. “After fifty-six minutes of this, his brain activity returned to the long, slow delta waves?”

“That’s right. Until he died the next morning.”

“So if it’s not two machines malfunctioning, how do you explain all of this, Doctor?”

“I don’t. I can’t. You asked me if there was anything unusual in the patient’s file. Specifically, something…
uncanny
.”

“Yes, but—”

“I don’t have a dictionary handy, but I believe
uncanny
means something not normal, something extraordinary, something that can’t be explained. I can only tell you what happened, Mr. Truman, not a damn thing about
why
.”

Tongues of rain licked the windows.

With snuffle, growl, and keening petition, the wolfish wind begged entry.

Across the fabled city rolled a low protracted rumble.

Ethan and O’Brien looked toward the windows, and Ethan supposed that the physician, too, had envisioned a terrorist attack somewhere, women and babies murdered by the fascistic Islamic radicals who fed on wickedness and crawled the modern world with demon determination.

They listened to the sound slowly fade, and finally Dr. O’Brien said with relief, “Thunder.”

“Thunder,” Ethan agreed.

Thunder and lightning were not common to storms in southern California. This peal, in place of bomb blast, suggested a turbulent day ahead.

Beta waves, as jagged as lightning, struck repeatedly across the computer screen.

Comatose, Dunny had experienced a terrifying encounter that had occurred neither in this world nor in the land of dreams, but in some realm mysterious. He had engaged in a conversation without spoken words, as if he’d breathed in a ghost that had traveled to his lungs and thence into his arteries, by blood from heart to brain, there to haunt him in the shadowy rooms of his mind for fifty-six minutes.