Winston peered into the pack before reaching inside, as if whatever it held might bite. Inside he found some paperwork from a funeral home, a plot plan of a graveyard, and a red Bible with a gold Gideon stamp.
“Stealing a hotel Bible, Drew? That’s low.”
“It’s not mine. Check the inside cover.”
Winston opened it to find that someone had used the watermark as a note pad, filling it with various phone numbers, and doodles. The only name on the page was that of Vicki Sanders, but there was no phone number beside the name.
“The blueprints are of Corona Del Mar Memorial Park,” Drew said. “The circled grave belongs to Michael. And this backpack belonged to the man who tried to rob his grave.”
Winston snapped his eyes up from the backpack in surprise, but it quickly resolved into resignation.
“Reason enough for the bat signal?” asked Drew.
Winston flipped through the bible, but found no other marks beyond the ones on the inside cover. “Who was he?”
“His name is Martin Briscoe, and he’s pretty damn self-important. Even more self-important than you. He said he was on some kind of mission. Now do you want to hear the creepy part?”
Winston wondered if there was any part of this story that wasn’t creepy. “Sure, why not.”
“He said he had to destroy Michael’s remains.”
The morning sun did nothing to carry away the chill of the news. Even in death could there be no rest for them?
“He jammed his shovel into my arm, and I shot him in the eye with a blank,” Drew said. “I’ll survive, but unfortunately so will he.”
Winston stood and began to pace the dusty floor. “Do you know where he came from? Was he from some cult?” If one person found Michael’s grave, Winston knew others would, too. There were cults and crazies out there, more now than ever before. He remembered stories of how people regularly pried open the crypts of every celebrity from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis until their bodies had to be moved to protect them from their own legend. And now there was a man out there hell bent on destroying Michael’s remains. In a world where logic was diffracting out of focus, why should Winston expect this man’s actions to make sense . . . except for the fact that they did. Because destroying Michael’s remains was not the senseless act it seemed. It was a surgical strike against the shards; there had to be a body for a resurrection. “Destroying Michael’s remains is the only way to make sure Dillon can never bring him back.”
Drew nodded. “Somebody big doesn’t like you guys a whole lot.”
Winston shuddered at the thought. Somebody big? How big? “If there’s someone who wants to make sure Dillon doesn’t bring Michael back . . . maybe there’s a reason why Dillon should bring him back.”
“Whatever else you might have been,” Drew said. “You guys were a truly fearsome fivesome.”
It was true. Even with their formidable powers, the shards had always been stronger when they were together. Even with Deanna gone, Winston, Dillon, Tory, Michael, and Lourdes had been far greater together. “Whoever’s doing this wants to make sure that we’re never together again. Never whole—never complete.”
And all at once it occurred to Winston that this grave robber could be the man in the lavender chair, who invaded his dreams. The man who prepared the way for the faceless three. The more he considered it, the more certain he was. “Michael can’t be left there unprotected.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Drew told him, as he rocked gently back and forth, his feet on the edge of the foot locker. “Michael’s safe,” Drew said. “He’s among friends. . . .”
When it hit Winston just what Drew was saying, it hit him hard. He hadn’t eaten much over the past twenty-four hours, but now his late night burger and fries came surging toward daylight.
Drew had robbed Michael’s grave to prevent someone else from doing it first, and now sat sentinel beside his friend’s body. Michael was in the foot locker. God! No wonder Drew had tried to numb himself senseless with painkillers.
Winston fell to his knees, turned away, and retched onto the floor.
Damn you, Dillon, where are you? If ever there was a time Dillon needed to be here, now was that time.
“Don’t worry about cleaning up,” Drew said in that even, Vicodin-buffered voice. “The carpet’s history anyway.”
When Winston had recovered, he approached Drew, trying to keep the foot locker in his blind spot; then he gently touched Drew’s wounded arm. “I can’t heal it for you, but this should do something.”
Drew nodded. “I had lost some sensation in my fingertips. I just found it again. Thanks.”
“Nerve tissue regeneration,” said Winston. “No biggie.” Winston picked up the Bible, and looked at the notes scribbled across the watermark.
“I’ve tried the phone numbers in a dozen different area codes,” Drew told him. “I got a dry-cleaner in San Diego, a nursing home in East LA, and that’s about it. Nothing that seems related.”
“And Vicki Sanders?”
“I’ve found about a dozen of them on the Internet.”
“Then we’ll track down every one, until we find the one who can tell us what’s going on.” Winston forced himself to look at the foot locker resting ominously inert in the center of the room. Someone was fighting a guerilla war against them, but it was time to fight back. And if anyone were going to touch Michael’s body, they’d have to go through Winston to do it.
11. PARTY OF TWO
* * *
SHARKS. MADDY HAAS COULD NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT sharks. How the big ones would lose their stability, listing drunkenly in the largest of tanks, not knowing up from down, until they finally died. Hammerheads, Great Whites, Tiger sharks—none of them could survive in captivity.
“Shoop. Tomatoshoop.”
Dillon’s stupor was drug-induced, but like those sharks, it was an awful thing to behold. A being of such awe and majesty so suppressed as to choke on his own senses.
“Howstheshoop. Schloop. Sloop John B . . .”
An octopus in a tank, Maddie recalled, could squeeze itself through a hole in the glass an eighth of an inch wide, and die on the floor rather than be held in an aquarium.
“ ‘So hoisht up the John B’s shails, shee how the blah blah blah. Call fr the cap’n ashore n’lemme go home . . .’ ”
She hated Bussard for doing this to Dillon, and hated the fact that she was also a party to it.
She tasted the soup, which was saltier than the Dead Sea. Apparently Dillon’s blood pressure was not of concern to Bussard. Maddy dipped in the spoon and blew on it to cool it down for Dillon, who sat before her, immobilized in his chair.
Maddie looked around Dillon’s cubical cell, as he continued to sing, his volume slipping in and out like a radio with a bad tuner. Bussard had told her there were only a handful of people with security clearance to be in there, and she wondered what on earth made Bussard trust her enough to be one of those people. Then it occurred to her, it wasn’t how much he trusted her, it was how little he trusted everyone else.
In her three weeks of meals with Dillon—especially those days before they began to drug him, she had learned from Dillon firsthand what he had been through, and who he truly was. The man beneath the myth, more boy than man. He was not, as Bussard suggested, secretive about himself, or his motives. It was the fact that he was so forthcoming that made Bussard suspicious, and he continued to scrutinize the tapes of her meals with Dillon.
“Are you afraid of me, Maddy?” Dillon had asked her early on, when her hands still shook while feeding him. And since he could read the pattern of a lie, she had told him the truth. Yes, she was. When she had first arrived at the plant—and first came to know who they had trussed up in this place—she had been frightened of his eyes, invasive by nature. They seemed uncontained by the mask. His presence had been—still was—a tidal wave before her; a wall of looming force from which there was no hiding. No wonder he was worshipped. No wonder he was feared. Yet although the sensation of his p
ower hadn’t diminished, it was a feeling she had come to enjoy. If he asked her now whether or not she feared him, she’d have to tell him that she wasn’t really sure.
“ ‘Let me go home . . . I wanna go home . . . I feel so broke up I wanna go home.’ ”
By the last line of the verse he was actually hitting some of the notes, and the slurred words were beginning to coalesce into English.
“My dad always sang that to me,” Dillon said. “That was before I killed him.”
He was fishing for a word of comfort. He wanted Maddy to remind him what he well knew—that his parents had been accidental victims of Dillon’s emergent powers, before Dillon had understood the power he had. It was like this at the beginning of each meal now. In grand, sedated melodrama, he would make vague but sweeping claims of guilt, and she would assuage them. It was already an old dance, and this time she wasn’t getting on the floor.
“Feeling sorry for yourself again?” Maddy raised the spoonful of soup to the small mouth slit in his mask. “Feel sorry for me—I have to listen to you.” He slurped the soup in, and spat it right back out.
“MSG,” he said. “Stuff’ll kill ya.”
Maddy calmly blotted the spots of soup from her uniform, feeling a new blossom of her anger toward Bussard. Dillon picked up on her anger, but was still too loopy to seize its direction.
“I’m sorry for being horrible, Maddy. It’s those shots. They make me horrible.”
Maddy wiped the orange spittle dripping from the mouth hole in the mask. “Nonsense. You’re beautiful when you’re sedated.”
“You’re beautiful when I’m sedated too.”
Maddy smiled. “I may have to eat your dessert for that one.”
Dillon snickered behind his mask, and took a few moments to take deep breaths. Good, thought Maddy, he’s working his way out of the fog. She took the time to eat some of her own meal, then began to cut Dillon’s meat for him. When he had eaten alone in his room, he had been free from his chair, and could eat with his own hands. Yet he didn’t complain about this new arrangement.
“The shots keep getting bigger every time they take me out,” he said. “Problem is I metabolize the stuff so fast, they gotta give me elephant doses. Can’t be healthy.”
Maddy speared a potato scallop, and lifted it toward his mask. “Open wide. I can’t see your mouth through the hole.”
She slipped it through the hole, and his tongue took it the rest of the way. “I feel like a slot machine.”
Maddy laughed. “If you were a slot machine, I might get something back.”
“Naah,” Dillon said. “Suckers’ game.”
“Not with you around,” Maddy noted. “Everyone knows how you shut down Las Vegas.”
Although Dillon’s arms were banded to the chair, there was some range of motion to his hands. Now he clenched them until his knuckles turned white. The influence of his presence in Vegas had altered the odds of every game—it had taken months for simple randomness to return. Even now there were pockets where the laws of probability were still in remission. “Stale house zones,” the casinos called them, and moved their gaming tables far, far away.
“To hell with Las Vegas,” Dillon said. “The slot machines all come up triple sevens, and a million people think it’s something biblical.”
“Is it?” Maddy found herself truly interested in his response.
“How should I know? If the wheels had sixes instead of sevens, they would say I was the Antichrist.”
Maddie smiled. “Haven’t you heard? You are.”
Dillon sighed. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. So how about some more red meat for Satan’s spawn?”
She swabbed a piece of meat in some A-1 and fed it to him. Maddy knew this would be a line of conversation Bussard would be interested in. She could almost feel him slithering like a snake in the wire that ran through her uniform. She could feel his eye in the tip of her buttonhole video camera. At first there had been a strong sense of betrayal each time she stepped in to dine with Dillon, but she suspected that he was aware of the camera, and that he understood her unwilling complicity with Bussard. His knowledge would make it all right—because then it would be a game the two of them were playing against Bussard.
Their ice cream had melted by the time they got to it, but rather than forming a puddle in their bowls, it held the shape of the scoop. Just one more little reminder that Dillon’s sphere of influence was ever present. Even molten ice cream stood at attention for Dillon, refusing to give in to entropy.
It was now, after Dillon had completely regained his faculties, that his hands began to tremble in a subtle full-body shiver. Maddy knew it wasn’t from the ice cream.
“Something out there?” she asked.
“There’s always something out there,” he told her. He took a few deep breaths and kept his panic suppressed. “It’s not so bad while I’m in here—but it doesn’t go away completely until they seal that door.”
Maddy didn’t pretend to understand what Dillon was sensing. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to send him into convulsions every time they wheeled him out of the room. But rather than seeking the source of the seizures, Bussard had chosen to just shut them down, knocking Dillon out whenever they took him from his cell. Apparently consciousness was not a necessary factor in his “therapy sessions.”
Dillon took a deep breath and moved his fingers, pumping his fists open and closed.
“Make Bussard understand, Maddy. Make him understand that he can’t keep me here.” Any sluggishness had completely drained from his voice, the last of the tranquilizers already gone from his system. “You don’t know what will happen if I stay.”
“Death and destruction,” she said. “No one preaches doom better than you.”
“But you don’t know. I’ve seen hundreds of people whose bodies lived while their souls digested in the belly of a creature I’m still afraid to think about. Destruction doesn’t begin to describe it . . . and now I know there are worse things than death.”
Maddy suppressed her own shiver, and forced herself to look at the unexpressive mask that didn’t quite hide his intensity. “If things are as bad as you say out there, why do you want to be in the middle of it?”
“Even a losing battle has to be fought.”
“But you don’t even know what you’re fighting.”
“I will know. I’ll know once I’m out there.”
A moment of silence, and Maddy found herself looking away, shifting her attention to the vanilla simplicity of her ice cream. There was no sense even considering the thought of his freedom. She certainly couldn’t set him free, and suggesting as much to Bussard would be tantamount to suicide. And yet, as much as she wanted to see him free, she had to admit there was a side of her that wanted him trapped here. There was something incredibly heady about being Dillon Cole’s sole link to the outside world. There was a sense of significance that nothing in her life could match. The best way to ensure her position was to do her job, and continue to solicit Dillon’s trust. As long as her performance was exemplary, and Bussard had no reason to doubt her allegiance, her tenure was intact.
She wondered how much of this Dillon had figured out through the intonations of her voice, and her body language. The eye-slits in his mask had been made so narrow to keep him from perceiving anything in the people he had contact with. Although it slowed him down, he was still able to discern quite a lot through his little peep holes; a thousand things about her, that, in a moment, became a thousand and one.
“It’s your birthday!” he said, pulling the fact right out of thin air. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?”
She sighed. “And how did you know that?”
“Easy,” Dillon said. “The way you moved your spoon through the ice cream—like you were the reluctant center of the room’s attention. The way you noticed the wrinkles on your knuckles. The way your breath is just a few cubic centimeters deeper each time you cast your eyes down to the table, like so
me funky old body memory of blowing out candles when you were a kid.”
Maddy shook her head. Of all of Dillon’s gifts, she was most impressed by his ability to divine truths in the patterns of minutiae. “Birthdays don’t mean much to me,” she said.
“Still I’d like to give you a present.”
Maddy grinned, nervously. “The slot machine’s finally going to pay off?” She could see that hint of his eyes now; feel them rushing through the metallic squint of the mask, like an octopus willing itself through the breach of its tank. Maddy tried to resist that intrusive gaze, but found she could not. She had once commented to him that sitting before him was like playing a game of strip poker, where he held all the cards. But until now he had kept his hand to himself.
“I see a maze of mirrors when I look at you, Maddy. You’ve spent a lifetime raising the mirrors, confident that no one will get to the center. That no one will ever truly know you. You find lots of power in reflecting everyone away, don’t you?”
She tried not to speak—to say anything to deflect his gaze, but he would not let her.
“Listen to me carefully, Maddy,” he said. . . .
“I know you. I know you down to the thoughts you tell no one. I know you down to the dreams you can’t remember. I know you.”
She tried to speak, to make light of his words, but found she couldn’t. She could only slowly exhale, feeling the last vestments shielding her soul fall free.
“There. Happy Birthday, Maddy.”
She knew at once that he had begun some work in her, and she didn’t know how to accept that. He was uninvited, and yet welcome.
A few minutes later she wheeled the tray out and left him, trying to shield as best she could how deeply his words had touched her. But even Bussard was able to pick up on it.
“He’s getting to you, isn’t he?” Bussard asked when he next saw her, later that day.
“He’s a very powerful personality, sir.” Then she added, “All the more reason to keep him here.”
Appeased, Bussard congratulated her on what a fine job she was doing, and Maddy hoped to God he didn’t have a window to her soul the way Dillon did.