Bud looked at him. “I wasn’t planning on talking shop today.”
“Sorry.”
Bud thought about it. “Nah, you’re right, I should have been in touch. No, we haven’t got anywhere with the raccoon yet. No prints on the spike, no real leads on where it might have come from, none of your neighbours saw or heard anything.”
“I know; I asked them myself.”
“I figure whoever it was came in through there,” he said, nodding at the woods at the end of the garden. “Then round the side of the house to the front. That way they could have snuck in unobserved. From the other side, they could have come in over the fields and through the trees, but then they’d have to cross the green in full view of every house on the street.”
Alex looked at the trees. “Blackfish Road’s on the other side, isn’t it?”
Bud nodded. “About a mile.”
“So whoever it was knew the way through the woods to here.”
“Now, Alex,” Bud said in a disappointed voice. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Sure, it could be somebody local. Equally, it could be someone from out of town who did a lot of reconnaissance.”
So it could be someone he might have stood next to at the counter in the Telegraph, or it was someone who had stalked him for some time, scoping out where he lived. He couldn’t decide which was worse.
“So, not a prank.”
“We’ve not entirely ruled that out, but with a prank you’d expect it to have been done at night, when the chances of being seen were lowest. This was something different.”
Kitson had crossed Alex’s mind, but it was a long drive from Minneapolis to nail a dead raccoon to someone’s house, and it didn’t seem his style. And anyway, assuming he’d released Alex’s notes, he’d made his point. If it turned out he wasn’t responsible for that, well, it was still a long way to come to nail up a dead raccoon.
He said, “Well, anyway,” and he felt something tugging at his jeans, somewhere down around his knee. He looked down and saw a little girl standing next to him, one of the Chens’ daughters, he thought. He smiled at her and said, “And what can we get you? Hot dog? Some juice, maybe?”
The little girl—she couldn’t have been much more than five or six—put her thumb in her mouth and tugged his jeans again. Then she half turned and very solemnly pointed at the house.
Alex looked, and for a moment he couldn’t see what she was pointing at. Then he noticed a wisp of what looked like smoke curling from the edge of one of the little horizontal windows that ran along the base of the house and let a little daylight into the basement. As he watched, the wisp became denser and he thought he saw something orange-yellow flickering behind the dirty glass of the window.
“Oh, what?” he said quietly.
Bud looked and saw it too. “Is there anyone in the house?” he said.
“I don’t know.” Alex started to move. The front door was shut, but he’d left the kitchen door open so people could put gifts of food on the worktops or use the toilet.
“Alex,” said Bud, who had somehow telepathically summoned Muñoz to his side, “maybe let us handle it, okay?” But Alex was already at the kitchen door.
Inside, he could smell smoke, not barbecue smoke but something more acrid. Outside, he could hear Bud calling in a calm voice of authority, “Folks, could I have your attention? Folks? It looks like we might have a little situation here, so I’m going to ask you all to gather out on the far side of the green. No need to panic, but could you please move now?”
Alex went down the hallway and reached for the handle of the door to the basement, and as his fingers brushed the metal he felt rather than heard an electric snap and snatched his hand back. He reached out again and tapped the handle, but nothing happened, and he took hold of it and turned it.
Before he could open the door, someone stepped up beside him and put their hand on it. “Sir,” Muñoz said calmly, “please don’t do that.”
They exchanged a look, then Alex let go of the handle and put his hand flat on the door. It was hot. “Fuck,” he said.
“Please leave the building, sir,” Muñoz said.
Alex took his hand off the door and headed down the hall towards the stairs. “Check there’s nobody down here,” he said. “I’ll do upstairs.”
There was nobody in the upstairs bathroom, or in his bedroom, or the bedroom he used as a study. The smell of smoke was stronger now, and there was a smell of electricity in the air too, almost as if a thunderstorm was gathering in the house. Downstairs, he could hear Muñoz shouting, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He opened the door to the third bedroom and stopped dead in the doorway.
The room was full of sparks. They covered the walls and the floor and the furniture and danced in the air, and they outlined the figure standing in the middle of the room.
Alex said, “Hey,” and the word barely made it past his lips.
The figure was hard to see, somehow, not blurred so much as hard to understand. It seemed to be male, and wearing dark clothing. It turned and Alex could see that it had no face. Or rather, it had all faces, a montage of human and animal faces that cycled almost too fast to resolve.
The last thought that went through Alex’s mind before his knees gave way was, So that’s what Walt Booker meant. Then Muñoz, who was considerably stronger than he looked, had him in a fireman’s carry and was heading down the stairs and out the front door.
When his head cleared, he found himself sitting on the grass on the far side of the green, among the crowd of barbecue guests. On the other side, Bud and Muñoz were organising people to move their cars off the street so the emergency services could have access, and some vehicles had already been driven onto the grass. Smoke was pouring out of the open front door of the house.
“Fuck,” Alex said again.
Wendy knelt down beside him. “Hey,” she said. “You okay?”
“Yes,” he said, confused. “I saw—” and then there was a thud that he felt through the ground and the house seemed to slump, almost disappointedly. He heard glass breaking and walls cracking.
“That’ll be the furnace,” he heard Ralph say, behind him.
EVERYONE WOUND UP, temporarily, at the New Rose Hotel. Bud and his men took statements and then rides were organised to take people home. Which left the residents of East Walden Lane sitting in the Prairie Dining Room drinking coffee and talking in low voices and occasionally casting angry looks in Alex’s direction.
“You should have told me there were firearms and ammunition on the property,” Bud said.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Alex told him. “The Shanahans left them behind.”
“I don’t care whose they were; you should have told me.”
Rosewater County’s emergency services, firetrucks and paramedics and police and Sheriff’s Department, had all arrived more or less simultaneously within about ten minutes of being alerted, and had then been forced to hang back while they listened to the ammunition in the gun safe cooking off and flames licked out of the ground floor windows.
“Okay,” Alex said, feeling beaten. “I’m sorry.”
Bud looked at him, judged that he had been bawled out enough, and his expression softened. “How are you feeling?”
He nodded. “I’m fine. What state’s the house in?” Bud and Muñoz had stayed behind when everyone else was ferried into town.
“Well, the fire’s out. There’s a crew still out there, damping down. The propane tank didn’t go up, for a miracle.”
“That’s something, anyway.” He watched Homer wandering around the dining room, sniffing at all the new things and pestering people for ear scritches. Ralph had refused to leave his house without him.
“Nobody’s going to be living there for a while, though.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“One of your neighbours turned his ankle, out on the green, but apart from that everyone’s accounted for and safe and sound.”
“That’s good
,” Alex said tiredly. “That’s the main thing.” Across the dining room, he saw Danny Hofstadter, newly reelected Mayor, chatting with a few of the neighbours. What Alex really wanted to do was talk to Dru about what he’d seen upstairs in the house, but after gathering a few quotes she’d headed for the Banner offices to write up the story.
“That was quite a brave thing to do, going into the house like that,” Bud said.
“I wasn’t thinking,” Alex said. “Could you say thank you to Officer Muñoz for getting me out of there?”
“I’ll do that. But, Alex? The line between brave and stupid is sometimes really really thin.”
“He gets it, Bud,” said Wendy, who was sitting on the other side of Alex.
Danny came over, shook hands with Bud, and looked down at Alex. “Hey,” he said, “how are you doing?”
“I’m okay, thanks, Danny,” Alex said. “Nobody was hurt, that’s the main thing.”
Danny looked at them, then back at Alex. “Look, I want you to stay here, okay? On the house. Until things shake out and you know what’s going to happen.”
Alex looked blankly at him. “Thank you, Danny.”
Danny grinned. “We can’t put you in the Presidential Suite again because we’ve got someone coming through in a couple of days, but we’ll make sure you’re comfortable.”
“Okay.” Alex nodded.
“Okay,” said Danny. “I have to take care of something, but I’ll speak with you soon.”
“Right.”
As Danny walked away, Bud said, “Folks round here are pretty good, generally. We’ll look after you.”Alex burst into tears.
THE CORNER ROOM they put him in, on the third floor, was smaller than the Presidential Suite, but only in the sense that it was possible to trek from one side of it to the other without stocking up on a couple of days’ food and water. It was still at least twice the size of his old apartment. It was on the other side of the hotel, and from its big windows he could just see, in the far distance, the top floor of the main building of the SCS poking up above the trees.
The first evening, when everything got too much for him, he left everyone downstairs in the dining room and went up to the room and had a long hot shower. A remarkable amount of grime pooled around his feet and went down the plughole.
His clothes were filthy. He wrapped himself in one of the hotel’s fluffy blue towelling robes and lay on the bed, exhausted. He was just drifting off to sleep when there was a knock on the door. When he answered it there was nobody there, but on the floor outside were two plastic carrier bags full of clothes, a couple of pairs of jeans, underwear, tee shirts, sweatshirts, and a couple of hoodies, and he almost broke down again.
Mickey Olive turned up a few minutes later, all efficient and concerned. “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, old son,” he said. “I only just heard what happened.” The fact that he hadn’t been invited to the barbecue was not mentioned. “Is there anything you need?”
“I think I could do with going to sleep, Mickey,” Alex told him. “I’ve had a day.”
“Of course. Do you have your phone?”
Alex shook his head. “In the house.” One of the hotel staff had let him into the room with a passkey.
“Right.” Mickey took a phone from his pocket and handed it over. “I brought this one, just in case. I’ll pop round tomorrow, see how you are, but in the meantime if you do need anything, give me a call. All right?”
“Sure. Thanks, Mickey.”
“Do you know how it started?”
Alex shook his head. “I had some trouble with the furnace when I first moved in, but I got that fixed. I don’t know.”
“Right. Well, get some rest and I’ll see you tomorrow. And don’t worry about anything.”
After he’d gone, Alex lay down on the bed again and closed his eyes, and the phone rang. He considered just turning it off, but he checked the caller ID and pressed ‘answer’.
“Alex,” said Stan. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, Stan,” he said. “Really. Nobody was hurt, we don’t know how it started, and everyone’s being really nice to me.”
There was a brief silence. “Good. I just wanted to tell you not to worry about anything. We’ll get this fixed.”
Considering what the house had looked like the last time he’d seen it, Alex thought this was quite a commitment, but he just said, “Okay, Stan.”
“You’re at the New Rose, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. They’ll take care of you. The restaurant’s terrific. Rest and recover. Don’t worry about the book.”
Alex groaned.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He’d forgotten the laptop, and all the backups of his work, in the safe in the basement, along with the 007 Phone. He closed his eyes and grimaced. “Listen, Stan, I’m really tired. Can we talk tomorrow?”
“Yeah, sure. I just wanted to make sure you were okay and being looked after. Talk to you tomorrow. Take care, Alex.” And he hung up.
Alex turned the phone off and dropped it on the bed beside him. After a couple of moments, he got up and opened the door to hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the handle. Outside were another two bags of clothes.
THE NEXT MORNING, unwilling to face the world, he ordered a room service breakfast. He’d just finished when there was a knock at the door, and he found Bud outside blocking pretty much the whole corridor.
“Alex,” he said.
“Bud,” said Alex.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’ve more or less reached the limit of the number of times I can hear people asking me how I am, to be honest.”
Bud grunted. “I was going to head over to East Walden. Want to come along?”
Alex had been dreading going back, but he supposed it was better to get it over with. “Yes, okay.”
He stopped at the front desk on the way out, to get Grace to put the room’s key on his phone, then they drove through town. When they got to East Walden Lane, the first thing he saw was the green, its grass all chewed up by the tyres of the vehicles which had been parked on it the previous day.
The house was still standing, but it had settled in on itself, as if it had tried unsuccessfully to hide in its own basement. All the windows were broken, the ground floor was charred. The front lawn was a mess, soaked with water from firefighters’ hoses and then trodden into mud. The smell of burning was still very strong. A County Sheriff’s car was parked outside, East Walden being outside the jurisdiction of the Sioux Crossing PD. Bud went over to have a chat with the deputy in the cruiser and Alex stood by the truck, hands in the pockets of his donated hoodie, staring up at the place where he had once lived. He was surprised by how much it hurt.
“At least the roof’s okay,” called a voice.
He looked over, saw Ralph standing on his porch. “Yes,” he said. “We only need to demolish everything underneath it.” He walked up the path to Ralph’s house. “When did they let you come back?”
“Ten, eleven last night.” Ralph took the cigar out of his mouth. “I would be lying if I said you were wildly popular around here right now.”
Well, it wasn’t as if he was ever going to live on East Walden Lane again. He looked around, at his house, at the green. “Christ, what a mess.”
“It was the furnace, right?”
“Nobody knows for sure, yet. I only had the damn thing fixed a few months ago.”
“Knew a guy in Philadelphia, his furnace exploded one night,” Ralph said thoughtfully. “They found it a block away on the roof of a school.” He puffed on his cigar. “They never found him at all.”
“Thank you for using that charming little anecdote to make me feel better.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
Alex sighed. “I don’t know. I’m at the New Rose for the foreseeable future, however long that is.”
Ralph looked at him. “You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”
“It’s crossed my m
ind.”
“Jesus, Alex. This was an accident. Could have happened to anyone.”
Bud came up the path. “Deputy Lofgren says it’ll be a couple of days before anyone can go in there and assess the structure,” he said. “Ralph.”
“Bud,” said Ralph.
So the damn thing could still fall down. “My laptop’s in a safe in the basement,” Alex said.
Bud raised an eyebrow. “Well, I wouldn’t get your hopes up that it still works.”
There was also the 007 Phone. If he stopped checking in with Kitson, what would happen? Would the junior spy just decide to cut his losses and have him deported? He could still call the consulate from a public phone, but he was going to have to drive out of the county to do that. He said, “Can I pick up my car while I’m here?”
They all looked at the garage beside the house. It looked lightly scorched, but otherwise undamaged. “If you can get it started, I guess that’s okay,” Bud said. “Make sure you let the Sheriff’s Department know, though. They’re treating the place as a crime scene.”
“What?”
“Because of the raccoon.”
Alex thought about it. “Ah, bollocks.” That had never occurred to him.
“You think this was deliberate?” Ralph said with interest.
Bud looked at him. “Now you know I’m not going to discuss that with you, Ralph. And I’ll thank you not to go off spreading the word to anyone who’ll listen.”
Ralph looked affronted. “I have no time for gossip.”
“Yeah, right.” Bud said to Alex, “I have to get back to town. Can I give you a lift?”
“Can you drop me at Stu’s? I need to see if I can get a new laptop.”
“Sure.”
Alex turned to Ralph. “I’ll be over later.”
“I’ll be here,” Ralph said sullenly. “It’s not like I’m allowed to go anywhere and talk to anyone.”
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 19