“This is my dominion. You were trespassing.”
“Well, whether or not that’s true—”
“It is true.”
“—whether or not it is, you’re still scummy.”
“Come up the stairs, and talk with me about Norris Hiskott.”
FOURTEEN
The truck is equipped with a flat mirror and a convex mirror on each side of the cab, and a spot mirror on each front fender, all automatically adjustable, but the only thing I’m going to need them for is to be sure that the driver is still hiking away from his rig. And he is, clearly not tempted to come running back as soon as he hears me slam the cab door.
The big-bore engine is idling as I settle behind the wheel, but a well-integrated sound-dampening system isolates the engine noise so effectively that I’ve been in cars that are louder. It’s a cozy cab; and if I were going to drive it any distance, I would need yet another NoDoz to keep from being lulled to sleep by the low and comforting sound of the 15-liter engine filtering through the insulation.
I put the pistol between my legs—muzzle forward.
From the face of the overhead storage shelf and the flap door above the citizens-band radio, I remove the family photograph, the picture of the driver and his golden retriever, and the JESUS LOVES ME reminder card. I tuck them in my wallet and return the wallet to my hip pocket.
There’s GPS navigation, but as I am not driving even half a mile, I don’t need to enter an address. I release the brakes, put this big boy in gear, and head south on the county road toward the entrance to Harmony Corner. I haven’t driven one of these often and not for some time, but I don’t need to build up speed and take any chances, because it isn’t my intention to use the eighteen-wheeler as a ram or anything like that. I’m Odd but I’m not nuts.
Between the service station and the diner lies the large graveled area where truckers are directed to park. Last night, when Annamaria and I arrived, three rigs were tucked in there. The space can handle a dozen of these behemoths. At the moment, just before the breakfast rush starts to accelerate, five eighteen-wheelers are lined up like prehistoric beasts at a watering hole.
Passing the service station, I glimpse a couple of guys in there, but I’m too far away to see their faces. If one of them isn’t Donny, I wouldn’t know either of them, anyway. They don’t react as I sail by. To them I’m just another customer of the diner.
I hang a right turn into the parking area, come to a full stop, but leave the rig in gear. Ahead, at the western end of the parking area, a series of sturdy wooden posts, set in concrete and linked by a couple of rows of cables, define the point at which the land drops away into the hills that roll down toward the sea.
The only way that I’m going to have a chance to creep up on the house in which Norris Hiskott lives is to create sufficient chaos to preoccupy all of the Harmonys, chaos that their puppetmaster cannot afford to insist that they ignore.
I press the brake hard, rev the engine, feel the truck strain to be free, let up on the brake and an instant later the accelerator, snatch the pistol from between my legs as the rig begins to roll, and leap from the cab, kicking off from the step below the fuel tank. I stagger, stumble, fall, roll, and scramble to my feet as the vehicle rumbles toward the fence.
Whether or not the rig is moving fast enough won’t be clear until it hits the posts, but the distance is too short for it to lose much momentum in the approach. The combined weight of the rig and load is probably somewhere around eighty thousand pounds. In my book that is an irresistible force, and the fence falls short of being an immovable object.
I keep pace with the truck, sort of escorting it toward the drop-off. I have decidedly mixed feelings—delight, guilt, relief, anxiety—when the posts crack off where they’re sunk in concrete. They splinter, tumble away, trailing steel cables that snap almost like electric arcs jumping from pole to pole, and lash whistles from the air as they flail down and away. Although the rig seems as if it might hang up on the footings and the remnants of one post, it merely hesitates before taking the plunge.
FIFTEEN
So this creepy disembodied voice asks me to come up the dimly lighted stairs that look like they might evaporate behind me and leave me with no way down, and what I think of first is how and why my parents always used to tell me not to take candy from a stranger.
What I think of second, while I’m climbing the stairs, is some of the screwy situations kids get themselves into in fairy tales. Like Red Riding Hood visits Grandma’s house after Grandma has been eaten alive, and she’s suspicious and all about this transvestite wolf in Grandma’s nightgown and bonnet, lying in Grandma’s bed, but the twit doesn’t tumble to his true identity until he actually eats her. If the huntsman hadn’t come along to cut open the wolf’s stomach and let Grandma and Red out of there, they would have been nothing but a couple of bowel movements. Of course, it’s also screwy, the wolf supposedly swallowing them whole. If he’d tried to do that, he would need a badger or a bear or some woodland creature to apply the Heimlich maneuver.
At the top of the stairs, there’s a narrow catwalk of stainless steel. The softly illuminated handrail almost fades away in the gloom to the left and right, and there’s only just enough murky light to see a series of steel doors and big windows that look out on the darkness and the freaky sphere.
The sphere is still silvery and glimmering, kind of pretty for something that puts out such a bad vibe, which reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, which I recently read. Old Scarlett is super-pretty and vivacious, and you’ve got to admire her in some ways, but you know almost from the start, this babe is six different kinds of messed up. I don’t think I could have lived back then, if you want to know, because I would have been so mad about slavery and all, not to mention no TV.
Up here on the catwalk, about thirty feet above the floor, I see a feature of the sphere that wasn’t visible from below. In the top third of the thing, a single row of windows seems to run all the way around it. Each is maybe two feet long and like one foot high, set flush in the metal surface with no frames. If you consider the size of the sphere, the windows aren’t really big. They don’t look like ordinary glass, either. What they look like are thick slabs of rock crystal or something. Beyond them, inside the sphere, there’s this deep red light and terrible shadows moving through it ceaselessly, shapeless but disturbing shadows flying and leaping and twisting so crazy. I don’t like this thing at all, and I totally mean that.
As I turn away from the sphere, the stair and railing lights go off. Flanking one of the doors along the catwalk, two big windows brighten, though hardly so you’d notice. When I peer through one of them, I can’t see anything inside, just vague shapes, which probably means the glass is heavily tinted and polarized, so it looks clear from inside but not from out here, which is like the windows in the Harmony Corner diner.
An electric lock buzzes and clicks, and the door between those two windows swings inward a couple of inches, as if I’m being invited inside. Which reminds me of Hansel and Gretel. They come upon a house in the woods, it’s made of bread and cakes, and they right away chow down on it, never once realizing it can’t be anything but a lure and a trap. Then the fiendish old witch invites them inside, and they say sure, this is a cool place, and she’s so obviously fattening them up for slaughter with pancakes and apples and all. It’s like the tenth biggest miracle in history how the old hag, instead of the two urchins, ends up baking in the oven.
So I push the door open wider, and I don’t see any old, wrinkled hag anywhere in there, or a wolf, or any living thing. Living things are nearly always what get you, so as I cross the threshold, I don’t feel quite so naive as Hansel and Gretel. Besides, I’m not here just to stuff some cake down my piehole. I’m here because I’m hoping to learn something about Norris Hiskott that will make it possible for me to smash him as flat as I might smash a bug I didn’t like.
The room has two computer workstations, and along two walls
are all kinds of mad-doctor equipment that I couldn’t say what any of it is. In front of one of the two big windows is this long console with a lot of switches, buttons, levers, dials, gauges, indicator lights, and monitors, all dark and silent. The computers are dated, and it feels like no one has been here in a long time. On the other hand, there’s no dust, not a speck of it, as if the place has been airtight since they mothballed the project.
Through the windows, I can see the upper part of the silvery sphere. It looks like the moon come down to Earth.
In the back wall is another steel door, locked. There’s a six-inch-square view window about two-thirds of the way up the door, and when I stand on tiptoe, I can see through it, except the room beyond is dark.
The voice that sounds like that of a Darth Vader wannabe issues from speakers in the ceiling: “Jolie Ann Harmony.”
Turning away from the door, I say, “You again.”
“Tell me about Norris Hiskott.”
“Well, snoop and sneak that you are, you heard everything I said to Harry.”
“That is correct.”
“Then you’ve already heard just about every nasty thing that matters.”
“I would like to hear it again.”
“You should have paid attention the first time. Anyway, what are you, some kind of pervert, you suck on other people’s pain?”
After a silence, he says, with no emotion except curiosity, “You do not seem to like me.”
“There’s that keen insight of yours again.”
“Why do you not like me?”
“Snoop, sneak—heard that anywhere before?”
“I am only doing my job.”
“And what is your job?”
“That is classified information. Tell me again about Norris Hiskott.”
“Why?”
“I want to compare what you said to Harry with what you now will say to me. There may be significant discrepancies. You will tell me about Norris Hiskott again.”