13
DANNY TCHEDA and Pam Stevens already have their hands full with would-be gate-crashers when they hear the sound of motorcycles gunning toward them, and the arrival of the Thunder Five is all they need to make their day really complete. Getting rid of Teddy Runkleman and Freddy Saknessum had been easy enough, but not five minutes later the eastbound lanes of Highway 35 filled up with people who thought they had a perfect right to gawk at all the little corpses that were supposed to be stacked up in the wreckage of Ed's Eats. For every car they finally manage to send away, two more show up in its place. Everybody demands a long explanation of why they, as taxpayers and concerned citizens, should not be allowed to enter a crime scene, especially one so tragic, so poignant, so . . . well, so exciting. Most of them refuse to believe that the only body inside that tumbledown building is Irma Fre-neau's; three people in a row accuse Danny of abetting a cover-up, and one of them actually uses the word "Fishergate. " Yikes. In a weird way, lots of these corpse hunters almost think that the local police are protecting the Fisherman!
Some of them finger rosaries while they chew him out. One lady waves a crucifix in his face and tells him he has a dirty soul and is bound for hell. At least half of the people he turns away are carrying cameras. What kind of person sets off on a Saturday morning to take pictures of dead children? What gets Danny is this: they all think they're perfectly normal. Who's the creep? He is.
The husband of an elderly couple from Maid Marian Way says, "Young man, apparently you are the only person in this county who does not understand that history is happening all around us. Madge and I feel we have the right to a keepsake. "
A keepsake?
Sweaty, out of sorts, and completely fed up, Danny loses his cool. "Buddy, I agree with you right down the line," he says. "If it was up to me, you and your lovely wife would be able to drive away with a bloodstained T-shirt, maybe even a severed finger or two, in your trunk. But what can I say? The chief is a very unreasonable guy. "
Off zooms Maid Marian Way, too shocked to speak. The next guy in line starts yelling the moment Danny leans down to his window. He looks exactly like Danny's image of George Rathbun, but his voice is raspier and slightly higher in pitch. "Don't think I can't see what you're doing, buster!" Danny says good, because he's trying to protect a crime scene, and the George Rathbun guy, who is driving an old blue Dodge Caravan minus the front bumper and the right side-view mirror, shouts, "I been sitting here twenty minutes while you and that dame do doodly-squat! I hope you won't be surprised when you see some VIGILANTE ACTION around here!"
It is at this tender moment that Danny hears the unmistakable rumble of the Thunder Five charging toward him down the highway. He has not felt right since he found Tyler Marshall's bicycle in front of the old folks' home, and the thought of wrangling with Beezer St. Pierre fills his brain with dark oily smoke and whirling red sparks. He lowers his head and stares directly into the eyes of the red-faced George Rathbun look-alike. His voice emerges in a low, dead monotone. "Sir, if you continue on your present course, I will handcuff you, park you in the back of my car until I am free to leave, and then take you to the station and charge you with everything that comes to mind. That is a promise. Now do yourself a favor and get the hell out of here. "
The man's mouth opens and closes, goldfishlike. Splotches of brighter red appear on his jowly, already flushed face. Danny keeps staring into his eyes, almost hoping for an excuse to truss him in handcuffs and roast him in the back seat of his car. The guy considers his options, and caution wins. He drops his eyes, moves the shift lever to R, and nearly backs into the Miata behind him.
"I don't believe this is happening," Pam says. "What dumb so-and-so spilled the beans?"
Like Danny, she is watching Beezer and his friends roar toward them past the row of waiting cars.
"I don't know, but I'd like to ram my nightstick down his throat. And after him, I'm looking for Wendell Green. "
"You won't have to look very far. He's about six cars back in the line. " Pam points to Wendell's traveling sneer.
"Good God," Danny says. "Actually, I'm sort of glad to see that miserable blowhard. Now I can tell him exactly what I think of him. " Smiling, he bends down to speak to the teenaged boy at the wheel of the Miata. The boy leaves, and Danny waves off the driver behind him while watching the Thunder Five get closer and closer. He says to Pam, "At this point, if Beezer climbs up in my face and even looks like he wants to get physical, I'm pulling out my roscoe, honest to God. "
"Paperwork, paperwork," Pam says.
"I really don't give a damn. "
"Well, here we go," she says, telling him that if he pulls his gun, she will back him up.
Even the drivers trying to argue their way into the lane are taking time out to watch Beezer and the boys. In motion, hair and beards blowing, faces set, they look ready to commit as much mayhem as possible. Danny Tcheda's heart begins to speed, and he feels his sphincter tighten.
But the Thunder Five bikers race past without so much as turning their heads, one after another. Beezer, Mouse, Doc, Sonny, and the Kaiser ¡ª there they go, leaving the scene.
"Well, damn," Danny says, unable to decide if he feels relieved or disappointed. The abrupt jolt of dismay he registers when the bikers wheel around in a comprehensive, gravel-spraying U-turn thirty yards up ahead tells him that what he had felt was relief.
"Oh, please, no," Pam says.
In the waiting automobiles, every head turns as the motorcycles flash by again, returning the way they came. For a couple of seconds, the only sound to be heard is the receding furor of five Harley-Davidson cycles. Danny Tcheda takes off his uniform hat and wipes his forehead. Pam Stevens arches her back and exhales. Then someone blasts his horn, and two other horns join in, and a guy with a graying walrus mustache and a denim shirt is holding up a three-quarter-sized badge in a leather case and explaining that he is the cousin of a county-circuit judge and an honorary member of the La Riviere police force, which basically means he never gets speeding or parking tickets and can go wherever he likes. The mustache spreads out in a big grin. "So just let me get by, and you can go back to your business, Officer. "
Not letting him get by is his business, Danny says, and he is forced to repeat this message several times before he can get on to the next case. After sending away a few more disgruntled citizens, he checks to see how long he must wait before he can tell off Wendell Green. Surely the reporter cannot be more than two or three cars back. As soon as Danny raises his head, horns blast and people start shouting at him. Let us in! Hey, bud, I pay your salary, remember? I wanna talk to Dale, I wanna talk to Dale!
A few men have gotten out of their cars. Their fingers are pointing at Danny, their mouths are working, but he cannot make out what they are yelling. A band of pain runs like a red-hot iron bar from behind his left eye to the middle of his brain. Something is wrong; he cannot see Green's ugly red car. Where the hell is it? Damn damn and double damn, Green must have eased out of the line and driven into the field alongside Ed's. Danny snaps around and inspects the field. Angry voices and car horns boil up at his back. No beat-up red Toyota, no Wendell Green. What do you know, the windbag gave up!
A few minutes later the traffic thins out, and Danny and Pam think their job is pretty much over. All four lanes of Highway 35 are empty, their usual condition on a Saturday morning. The one truck that rolls along keeps on rolling, on its way to Centralia.
"Think we ought to go up there?" Pam asks, nodding toward the remains of the store.
"Maybe, in a couple minutes. " Danny is not eager to get within range of that smell. He would be perfectly happy to stay down here until the M. E. and the evidence wagon come along. What gets into people, anyhow? He would happily surrender two days' pay to be spared the sight of Irma Freneau's poor body.
Then he and Pam hear two distinct sounds at once, and neither one makes them comfortable. The fir
st is that of a fresh wave of vehicles racing down the highway to their position; the second, the rumble of motorcycles descending upon the scene from somewhere behind the old store.
"Is there a back road to this place?" he asks, incredulous.
Pam shrugs. "Sounds like it. But look ¡ª Dale'll have to deal with Beezer's goons, because we're gonna have our hands full down here. "
"Aw, cripes," Danny says. Maybe thirty cars and pickups are converging on the end of the little lane, and both he and Pam can see that these people are angrier and more determined than the first bunch. At the far end of the crowd, some men and women are leaving their vehicles on the shoulder and walking toward the two officers. The drivers at the front of the pack are waving their fists and shouting even before they try to turn in. Incredibly, a woman and two teenage kids are holding up a long banner that reads WE WANT THE FISHERMAN! A man in a dusty old Caddy thrusts his arm through the window and displays a handmade placard: GILBERTSON MUST GO.
Danny looks over his shoulder and sees that the Thunder Five must have found a back road, because four of them are standing out in front of Ed's, looking oddly like Secret Service agents, while Beezer St. Pierre is deep in discussion with the chief. And what they look like, it occurs to Danny, is two heads of state working out a trade agreement. This makes no sense at all, and Danny turns back to the cars, the lunatics with signs, and the men and women working their way toward him and Pam.
A barrel-chested, seventy-one-year-old man with a white goatee, Hoover Dalrymple, plants himself in front of Pam and starts demanding his inalienable rights. Danny remembers his name because Dalrymple initiated a brawl in the bar of the Nelson Hotel about six months earlier, and now here he is all over again, getting his revenge. "I will not speak to your partner," he yells, "and I will not listen to anything he says, because your partner has no interest in the rights of the people of this community. "
Danny sends away an orange Subaru driven by a sullen teenage boy in a Black Sabbath T-shirt, then a black Corvette with La Riviere dealer's plates and a strikingly pretty, strikingly foulmouthed young woman. Where do these people come from? He does not recognize anyone except Hoover Dalrymple. Most of the people in front of him now, Danny supposes, were hailed in from out of town.
He has set out to help Pam when a hand closes on his shoulder, and he looks behind him to see Dale Gilbertson side by side with Beezer St. Pierre. The four other bikers hover a few feet away. The one called Mouse, who is of course roughly the size of a haystack, catches Dale's eye and grins.
"What are you doing?" Danny asks.
"Calm down," Dale says. "Mr. St. Pierre's friends have volunteered to assist our crowd-control efforts, and I think we can use all the help they can give us. "
Out of the side of his eye, Danny glimpses the Neary twins breaking out of the front of the crowd, and he holds up a hand to stop them. "What do they get out of this?"
"Simple information," the chief says. "Okay, boys, get to work. "
Beezer's friends move apart and approach the crowd. The chief moves beside Pam, who first looks at him in amazement, then nods. Mouse snarls at Hoover Dalrymple and says, "By the power invested in me, I order you to get the fuck out of here, Hoover. " The old man vanishes so quickly he seems to have dematerialized.
The rest of the bikers have the same effect on the angry sightseers. Danny hopes they can maintain their cool in the face of steady abuse: a three-hundred-pound man who looks like a Hells Angel on a knife edge between self-control and mounting fury works wonders on a rebellious crowd. The biker nearest Danny sends Floyd and Frank Neary away just by raising his fist at them. As they melt back to their car, the biker winks at Danny and introduces himself as Kaiser Bill. Beezer's friend enjoys the process of controlling a crowd, and an immense grin threatens to break through his scowl, yet molten anger bubbles underneath, just the same.
"Who are the other guys?" Danny asks.
Kaiser Bill identifies Doc and Sonny, who are dispersing the crowd to Danny's right.
"Why are you guys doing this?"
The Kaiser lowers his head so that his face hangs two inches from Danny's. It is like confronting a bull. Heat and rage pour from the broad features and hairy skin. Danny almost expects to see steam puffing from the man's wide nostrils. One of the pupils is smaller than the other; explosive red wires tangle through the whites. "Why? We're doing it for Amy. Isn't that clear to you, Officer Tcheda?"
"Sorry," Danny mutters. Of course. He hopes Dale will be able to keep a lid on these monsters. Watching Kaiser Bill rock an ancient Mustang belonging to a fool kid who failed to back up in time, he is extremely happy that the bikers don't have any blunt instruments.
Through the vacant space formerly occupied by the kid's Mustang, a police car rolls toward Danny and the Kaiser. As it makes its way through the crowd, a woman wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and Capri pants bangs her hand against the passenger windows. When the car reaches Danny the two part-timers, Bob Holtz and Paul Nestler, jump out, gape at the Kaiser, and ask if he and Pam need help. "Go up and talk to the chief," Danny says, though he should not have to. Holtz and Nestler are nice guys, but they have a lot to learn about chain of command, along with everything else.
About a minute and a half later, Bobby Dulac and Dit Jesperson show up. Danny and Pam wave them through as the bikers charge into the fray and drag chanting citizens off the sides and hoods of their vehicles. Sounds of struggle reach Danny over angry shouts coming from the mob before him. It seems that he has been out here for hours. Thrusting people out of the way with great backswings of his arms, Sonny emerges to stand beside Pam, who is doing her best. Mouse and Doc wade into the clear. A trail of blood leaking from his nose, a red smear darkening his beard at the corner of his mouth, the Kaiser strides up beside Danny.
Just as the crowd begins chanting, "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO! HELL NO, WE WON'T GO!" Holtz and Nestler return to bolster the line. Hell no, we won't go? Danny wonders. Isn't that supposed to be about Vietnam?
Only dimly aware of the sound of a police siren, Danny sees Mouse wade into the crowd and knock out the first three people he can reach. Doc settles his hands on the open window of an all-too-familiar Oldsmobile and asks the small, balding driver what the hell he thinks he is doing. "Doc, leave him alone," Danny says, but the siren whoops again and drowns out his words.
Although the little man at the wheel of the Olds looks like an ineffectual math teacher or a low-level civic functionary, he possesses the determination of a gladiator. He is the Reverend Lance Hovdahl, Danny's old Sunday school teacher.
"I thought I could help," the reverend says.
"What with all this racket, I can't really hear you too good. Let me help you get closer," Doc says. He reaches in through the window as the siren whoops again and a State Police car slides by on the other side.
"Hold it, Doc, STOP!" Danny shouts, seeing the two men in the state car, Brown and Black, craning their necks to stare at the spectacle of a bearded man built like a grizzly bear dragging a Lutheran minister out through the window of his car. Creeping along behind them, another surprise, is Arnold Hrabowski, the Mad Hungarian, goggling through the windshield of his DAREmobile as if terrified by the chaos around him.
The end of the lane is like a war zone now. Danny strides into the screaming mob and shoves a few people aside on his way to Doc and his old Sunday school teacher, who looks shaken but not at all injured. "Well, Danny, my goodness," the minister says. "I'm certainly glad to see you here. "
Doc glares at the two of them. "You know each other?"
"Reverend Hovdahl, this is Doc," Danny says. "Doc, this is Reverend Hovdahl, the pastor at Mount Hebron Lutheran. "
"Holy moly," says Doc, and immediately begins to pat the little man's lapels and tug at the hem of his jacket, as if to pull him into shape. "Sorry, Reverend, I hope I didn't hurt you none. "
The state cops and the Mad Hungarian manage at last to squeeze out of the crowd.
The sound level decreases to a mild hubbub ¡ª one way or another, Doc's friends have silenced the loudest members of the opposition.
"Fortunately, the window is wider than I am," the reverend says.
"Say, maybe I could come over and talk to you someday," says Doc. "I've been doing a lot of reading about first-century Christianity lately. You know, G¨
za Verm¨¨s, John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen, stuff like that. I'd like to bounce some ideas off you. "
Whatever Reverend Hovdahl intends to say is obliterated by the sudden explosion of noise from the other end of the lane. A woman's voice rises like a banshee's, in an inhuman screeching that shivers the hairs on the nape of Danny's neck. It sounds to him as though escaped lunatics a thousand times more dangerous than the Thunder Five are raving through the landscape. What the devil could have happened up there?
" 'Hello boys'?" Unable to contain his indignation, Bobby Dulac turns to stare first at Dale, then at Jack. His voice rises, hardens. "Is this shit for real? 'Hello boys'?"
Dale coughs into his fist and shrugs. "He wanted us to find her. "
"Well, of course," Jack says. "He told us to come here. "
"Why would he do that, though?" Bobby asks.
"He's proud of his work. " From some dim crossroads in Jack's memory, an ugly voice says, Stay out of it. You mess with me and I'll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere. Whose voice had that been? With no more evidence than his conviction, Jack understands that if he could place that voice, he would put a name to the Fisherman. He cannot; all Jack Sawyer can do at this moment is remember a stink worse than the foul cloud that fills this crumbling building ¡ª a hideous smell that came from the southwest of another world. That was the Fisherman, too, or whatever the Fisherman was in that world.
A thought worthy of the former rising star of the LAPD's Homicide Division awakens in his mind, and he says, "Dale, I think you should let Henry hear that 911 tape. "
"I don't get it. What for?"
"Henry's tuned in to stuff even bats can't hear. Even if he doesn't recognize the voice, he'll learn a hundred times more than what we know now. "
"Well, Uncle Henry never forgets a voice, that's true. Okay, let's get out of here. The M. E. and the evidence wagon should show up in a couple of minutes. "
Trailing behind the other two men, Jack thinks of Tyler Marshall's Brewers cap and where he found it ¡ª that world he has spent more than half his life denying, and his return to which this morning continues to send shocks through his system. The Fisherman left the cap for him in the Territories, the land he had first heard of when Jacky was six ¡ª when Jacky was six, and Daddy played the horn. It is all coming back to him, that immense adventure, not because he wishes it, but because it has to come back: forces outside himself are picking him up by the scruff of his neck and carrying him forward. Forward into his own past! The Fisherman is proud of his handiwork, yes, the Fisherman is deliberately taunting them ¡ª a truth so obvious none of the three men had to speak it aloud ¡ª but really the Fisherman is baiting only Jack Sawyer, who alone has seen the Territories. And if that's true, as it has to be, then ¡ª
¡ª then the Territories and all they contain are involved somehow in these wretched crimes, and he has been thrust into a drama of enormous consequence he cannot possibly grasp right now. The Tower. The Beam. He had seen this in his mother's handwriting, something about the Tower falling and the Beams breaking: these things are parts of the puzzle, whatever they mean, as is Jack's gut conviction that Tyler Marshall is still alive, tucked away in some pocket of the other world. The recognition that he can never speak of all this to anyone else, not even Henry Leyden, makes him feel intensely alone.
Jack's thoughts blow away in the noisy chaos that erupts alongside and in front of the shack. It sounds like an Indian attack in a cowboy movie, whooping and yelling and the sound of running feet. A woman sends up a shrill scream eerily like the blip-blips of the police siren he had half-noted a few moments ago. Dale mutters "Jeez," and breaks into a run, followed by Bobby and Jack.
Outside, what appears to be a half dozen crazy people are racing around in the weedy gravel in front of Ed's. Dit Jesperson and Beezer, still too stunned to react, watch them caper back and forth. The crazy people make an amazing amount of noise. One man yells, "KILL THE FISHERMAN! KILL THE DIRTY BASTARD!" Another is shouting "LAW 'N' ORDER 'N' FREE BEER!" A scrawny character in bib overalls picks up "FREE BEER! WE WANT FREE BEER!" A harpy too old for her tank top and blue jeans skitters around waving her arms and screeching at the top of her lungs. The grins on their faces indicate that these people are engaged in some dimwitted prank. They are having the time of their lives.
Up from the end of the lane comes a State Police car, with the Mad Hungarian's DARE Pontiac right behind it. In the middle of the chaos, Henry Leyden tilts his head and smiles to himself.