He started the truck and put it in gear. He would stop to gas up at the Hi station on Route 17 outside of town. That was the right place, because the guy who worked the night shift--Cody, his name was--always had a good supply of little white pills. Cody sold them to the truckers either highballing north to Chicago or down south to Texas. For Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD, there would be no charge.
The truck's dashboard was dusty. At the first stop sign, he leaned over to his right and wiped it clean, getting rid of the word his passenger's finger had left there.
MUST.
NO END TO THE UNIVERSE
July 26th
1
What sleep Ralph got was thin and broken by bad dreams. In one of them, he held the dying Terry Maitland in his arms, and Terry said, "You robbed my children."
Ralph woke at four thirty and knew there would be no more sleep. He felt as if he had entered some heretofore unsuspected plane of existence, and told himself everyone felt that way in the small hours. That was good enough to get him into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth.
Jeannie was sleeping as she always did, with the coverlet pulled up so high that she was nothing but a hump with a fluff of hair showing over the top. There was gray in that hair now, as there was in his. Not much, but more would be coming right along. That was all right. Time's passage was a mystery, but it was a normal mystery.
The breeze from the air conditioner had spilled some of the pages Jeannie had printed onto the floor. He put them back on the night table, picked up his jeans, decided they would do for another day (especially in dusty south Texas), and went to the window with them in his hand. The first gray light was creeping into the day. It would be a hot one here, and hotter still where they were going.
He observed--without much surprise, although he couldn't have said why--that Holly Gibney was down there, dressed in her own pair of jeans and sitting in the lawn chair where Ralph himself had been sitting little more than a week ago, when Bill Samuels had come calling. The evening Bill had told him the story of the disappearing footprints and Ralph had matched him with the one about the infested cantaloupe.
He pulled on his pants and an Oklahoma Thunder tee-shirt, checked Jeannie again, and left the room with the old scuffed moccasins he wore as bedroom slippers dangling from two fingers of his left hand.
2
He stepped out the back door five minutes later. Holly turned at the sound of his approach, her small face cautious and alert but not (or so he hoped) unfriendly. Then she saw the mugs on the old Coca-Cola tray and her face lit up with that radiant smile. "Is that what I hope it is?"
"It is if you were hoping for coffee. I take mine straight, but I brought the other stuff in case you want it. My wife takes it white and sweet. Like me, she says." He smiled.
"Black is fine. Thank you so much."
He put the tray on the picnic table. She sat across from him, took one of the mugs, sipped. "Oh, this is good. Nice and strong. There's nothing better than strong black coffee in the morning. That's what I think, anyway."
"How long have you been up?"
"I don't sleep much," she said, neatly dodging the question. "It's very pleasant here. The air is so fresh."
"Not so fresh when the wind comes from the west, believe me. Then you smell the refineries in Cap City. Gives me a headache."
He paused, looking at her. Holly looked away, holding her cup to her face, as if to shield it. Ralph thought back to last night, and how she had seemed to steel herself for every handshake. He had an idea that this woman found many of the world's ordinary gestures and interactions quite difficult. And yet she had done some amazing things.
"I read up on you last night. Alec Pelley was right. You have quite a resume."
She made no reply.
"In addition to stopping that guy Hartsfield from bombing a bunch of kids, you and your partner, Mr. Hodges--"
"Detective Hodges," she corrected. "Retired."
Ralph nodded. "In addition to that, you and Detective Hodges saved a girl who was kidnapped by a crazy guy named Morris Bellamy. Bellamy was killed during the rescue. You were also involved in a shootout with a doctor who went off the rails and killed his wife, and last year you nailed a bunch of guys who were stealing rare-breed dogs, either ransoming them back to their owners or selling them on if the owners wouldn't pay. When you said part of your business was finding lost pets, you weren't kidding."
She was blushing again, all the way up from the base of her neck to her forehead. It was pretty clear that this enumeration of her past exploits made her more than uncomfortable; she found it actively painful.
"It was mostly Bill Hodges who did those things."
"Not the dognappers. He passed on a year before that case."
"Yes, but by then I had Pete Huntley. Ex-Detective Huntley." She looked directly at him. Made herself do it. Her eyes were clear and blue. "Pete's good, I couldn't keep the business going without him, but Bill was better. Whatever I am, Bill made me. I owe him everything. I owe him my life. I wish he were here now."
"Instead of me, you mean?"
Holly didn't reply. Which was a reply, of course.
"Would he have believed in this El Cuco shape-shifter?"
"Oh yes." She said it without hesitation. "Because he . . . and I . . . and our friend Jerome Robinson, who was with us . . . have the benefit of certain experiences that you don't have. Although you may, depending on how the next few days go. You may before the sun goes down tonight."
"Can I join you?"
It was Jeannie, with her own cup of coffee.
Ralph gestured for her to sit down.
"If we woke you, I'm very sorry," Holly said. "You were so kind to let me stay."
"Ralph woke me, tiptoeing out like an elephant," Jeannie said. "I might have gone back to sleep, but then I smelled coffee. Can't resist that. Oh good, you brought out the half and half."
Holly said, "It wasn't the doctor."
Ralph raised his eyebrows. "Beg pardon?"
"His name was Babineau, and he went off the rails, all right, but he was forced off them, and he didn't kill Mrs. Babineau. Brady Hartsfield did that."
"According to what I read in the news stories my wife found online, Hartsfield died in the hospital before you and Hodges tracked Babineau down."
"I know what the news stories said, but they're wrong. May I tell you the real story? I don't like to tell it, I don't even like to remember those things, but you might need to hear it. Because we're going into danger, and if you keep believing that it's a man we're going after--twisted, perverse, murderous, but still just a man--you're going to be putting yourself into greater danger."
"The danger is here," Jeannie protested. "This outsider, the one who looks like Claude Bolton . . . I saw him here. I said that last night, at the meeting!"
Holly nodded. "I think the outsider was here, I might even be able to prove it to you, but I don't think he was completely here. And I don't think he's here now. He's there, in Texas, because Bolton is there, and the outsider will be close to him. He'll have to be close, because he's been . . ." She paused, chewing her lip. "I think he's been exhausting himself. He's not used to people coming after him. Of knowing what he is."
"I don't understand," Jeannie said.
"May I tell you the story of Brady Hartsfield? That might help." She looked at Ralph, again making an effort to meet his eyes. "It may not make you believe, but it will make you understand why I can."
"Go ahead," Ralph said.
Holly began to speak. By the time she finished, the sun was rising red in the east.
3
"Wow," Ralph said. It was all he could think of.
"This is true?" Jeannie asked. "Brady Hartsfield . . . what? Somehow jumped his consciousness into this doctor of his?"
"Yes. It might have been the experimental drugs Babineau was feeding him, but I never thought that was the only reason he was able to do it. There was something in Hartsfield already, and the
knock on the head I gave him brought it out. That's what I believe." She turned to Ralph. "You don't believe it, though, do you? I could probably get Jerome on the phone, and he'd tell you the same thing . . . but you wouldn't believe him, either."
"I don't know what to believe," he said. "This rash of suicides brought on by subliminal messages in video games . . . the newspapers reported it?"
"Newspapers, TV, the Internet. It's all there."
Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability (if not genuine mental health) had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were friends.
She spoke without looking at either of them now, looking off into the distance instead. "Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time the business with Babineau and Hartsfield happened. He was in the hospital for awhile afterwards, but then he came home. By that time all of us knew how it was going to end . . . including him, although he never said so, and he fought that fracking cancer right to the finish. I used to go over almost every night, partly to make sure he was eating something, partly just to sit with him. To keep him company, but also to . . . I don't know . . ."
"Fill yourself up with him?" Jeannie said. "While you still had him?"
The smile again, the radiant one that made her look young. "Yes, that's it. Exactly. One night--this wasn't long before he went back into the hospital--the power went out in his part of town. A tree fell on a line, or something. When I got to Bill's house, he was sitting on the front step and looking up at the stars. 'You never see them like this when the streetlights are on,' he said. 'Look at how many there are, and how bright!'
"It seemed like you could see the whole Milky Way that night. We sat there for a little while--five minutes, I guess--not talking, just looking. Then he said, 'Scientists are starting to believe that there's no end to the universe. I read that in the New York Times last week. And when you can see all the stars there are to see, and know there's even more beyond them, that's easy to believe.' We never talked much about Brady Hartsfield and what he did to Babineau after Bill got really sick, but I think he was talking about it then."
"More things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy," Jeannie said.
Holly smiled. "I guess Shakespeare said it best. He said pretty much everything best, I think."
"Maybe it wasn't Hartsfield and Babineau he was talking about," Ralph said. "Maybe he was trying to come to terms with his own . . . situation."
"Of course he was," Holly said. "That, and all the mysteries. Which is what we need to--"
Her cell phone tweeted. She took it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and read the text.
"That was from Alec Pelley," she said. "The plane Mr. Gold chartered will be ready to take off at nine thirty. Are you still planning on making the trip, Mr. Anderson?"
"Absolutely. And since we're in this together--whatever it is--you better start calling me Ralph." He finished his coffee in two swallows and stood up. "I want to arrange for a couple of unis to keep an eye on the house while I'm gone, Jeannie. Any problem with that?"
She batted her eyelashes. "Just make sure they're good-looking."
"I'll try for Troy Ramage and Tom Yates. Neither of them looks like a movie star, but they're the two who actually arrested Terry Maitland at the ballfield. It feels right for them to have at least some role in this."
Holly said, "There's something I need to check, and I'd like to do it now, before it's full daylight. Can we go back to the house?"
4
At Holly's request, Ralph pulled the shades in the kitchen and Jeannie closed the drapes in the living room. Holly herself sat at the kitchen table with the markers and the roll of Scotch Magic Tape she'd bought in the office supplies department at Walmart. She tore off two short lengths of tape and placed them over her iPhone's embedded flash. These she colored blue. She tore off a third length, put it over the blue strips, and colored it purple.
She stood up and pointed to the chair nearest the archway. "That's the one he was sitting in?"
"Yes."
Holly took two flash pictures of the seat, moved to the archway, and pointed again. "And this is where he sat."
"Yes. Right there. But there were no marks on the carpet in the morning. Ralph looked."
Holly dropped to one knee, took four more pictures of the carpet, then stood up. "Okay. That should be good."
"Ralph?" Jeannie asked. "Do you know what she's doing?"
"She's turned her phone into a makeshift black light." Something I could have done myself, if I had actually believed my wife--I've known about this particular trick for at least five years. "You're looking for stains, aren't you? Residue, like the stuff in the barn."
"Yes, but if there is any, there's much less of it, or you would have seen it with your naked eye. You can buy a kit online to do this kind of testing--it's called CheckMate--but this should work. Bill taught me. Let's see what we've got. If anything."
They gathered around her, one on either side, and for once Holly didn't mind the physical closeness. She was too absorbed, and too hopeful. I have Holly hope, she told herself.
The stains were there. A faint yellowish spatter on the seat of the chair, where Jeannie's intruder had sat, and several more--like small drips of paint--on the carpet at the edge of the archway.
"Holy shit," Ralph murmured.
"Look at this one," Holly said. She spread her fingers to enlarge a splotch on the carpet. "See how it makes a right angle? That's from one of the chair legs."
She went back to the chair and took another flash photo of it, only this time down low. Once more they gathered around the iPhone. Holly spread her fingers again, and one of the chair legs leaped forward. "That's where it dribbled down. You can raise the shades and open the drapes, if you want."
When the kitchen was once more filled with morning light, Ralph took Holly's phone and went through the pictures again, swiping from one to the next, then going back. He felt the wall of his disbelief beginning to crumble, and in the end all it had taken was a bunch of photos on a small iPhone screen.
"What does it mean?" Jeannie asked. "I mean, in practical terms? Was he here, or wasn't he?"
"I told you, I haven't had the chance to do anything like the amount of research I'd need to give an answer I felt sure of. But if I was forced to guess, I'd say . . . both."
Jeannie shook her head, as if to clear it. "I don't understand."
Ralph was thinking about the locked doors and the burglar alarm that hadn't gone off. "Are you saying this guy was a . . ." Ghost was the word that first came to mind, but it wasn't the right one.
"I'm not saying anything," Holly said, and Ralph thought, No, you're not. Because you want me to say it.
"That he was a projection? Or an avatar, like in the video games our son plays?"
"Interesting idea," Holly said. Her eyes were sparkling. Ralph had an idea (sort of an infuriating one) that she might be holding back a smile.
"There's residue, but the chair didn't leave marks in the carpet," Jeannie said. "If he was here in any physical sense, he was . . . light. Maybe no heavier than a feather pillow. And you say doing this . . . this projection . . . exhausts him?"
"It seems logical--to me, at least," Holly said. "The one thing we can be sure of is that something was here when you came downstairs yesterday morning. Would you agree with that, Detective Anderson?"
"Yes. And if you don't start calling me Ralph, Holly, I'll have to arrest you."
"How did I get back upstairs?" Jeannie asked. "Did he . . . please tell me he didn't carry me after I passed out."
"I doubt it," Holly said.
Ralph said, "Maybe some sort of . . . just guessing here . . . hypnotic suggestion?"
"I don't know. There's a gr
eat deal we may never know. I'd like a quick shower, if that's all right?"
"Of course," Jeannie said. "I'll scramble us some eggs." Then, as Holly started out: "Oh my God."
Holly turned back.
"The stove light. It was on. The one over the burners. There's a button." When looking at the pictures, Jeannie had seemed excited. Now she only looked scared. "You need to push it to turn the light on. There was enough of him here to do that, at least."
Holly said nothing to this. Neither did Ralph.
5
After breakfast, Holly returned to the guest room, supposedly to pack her things. Ralph suspected she was actually giving him time and privacy to say goodbye to his wife. She had her odd quirks, did Holly Gibney, but stupid she was not.
"Ramage and Yates will be keeping a close eye out," he told Jeannie. "They both took personal days."
"They did that for you?"
"And I think for Terry. They feel almost as badly as I do about how that went down."
"Have you got your gun?"
"In my carry-on for now. Once we land, I'll have it holstered on my belt. And Alec will have his. I want you to get yours out of the gun safe. Keep it close."
"Do you really think--"
"I don't know what to think, I'm with Holly on that. Just keep it close. And don't shoot the mailman."
"Listen, maybe I should come."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
He didn't want them in the same place today, but didn't want to say why and worry her even more. They had a son to think about, one who was currently playing baseball or shooting arrows at targets backed with bales of hay or making beaded belts. Derek, who wasn't much older than Frank Peterson had been. Derek, who simply assumed, as most kids did, that his parents were immortal.
"You could be right," she said. "Somebody ought to be here if D calls, don't you think?"
He nodded and kissed her. "That's just what I was thinking."
"Be careful." She was looking up at him, eyes wide, and he had a sudden piercing memory of those eyes looking up at him in that same loving, hopeful, anxious way. That had been at their wedding, as they stood before their friends and relatives, swapping vows.