by John Farris
"All right. What if we find him, and he does have a shotgun?"
"Sheriff U—Jones. That young man is very valuable to us. If any harm comes to him, I promise we will render your ass and turn your testicles into blue-ribbon nut butter. Inform your deputies, Sheriff Jones."
The sheriff shrugged and dispatched two deputies in the other SUV, sent Rachael Humbard and a highway patrolman down to the river again to see what might have been overlooked. Special Agent Brooker pressed the send key on his walkie and ordered the helicopter parked in front of the Chevron station back into the air. Eden Waring's dpg walked behind him to the bridge and started across. Now that the helicopter was no longer blocking the way, it was time for the merry chase she'd been cooking up.
FBI Director Robert Hyde was the first man out of the helicopter after it landed on the Little League field. Four boys and a girl with gloves and bats were standing near the backstop.
"Sorry about your game," Hyde said. "You children go home now."
The boldest boy among them spoke up. "Who are you?"
"I'm the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. From Washington. This is a matter of national security. Please disperse at once."
Hyde never had known how to talk to kids. They stayed right where they were. Another boy said, "My dad's a park ranger."
The sheriff's department SUV pulled up. Another agent from Hyde's helicopter handed him a walkie. "It's Mr. Brooker, sir. I'll handle the Little Leaguers."
"Yes, Brooker. Where's my son?" Hyde listened. He didn't like what he heard and cut Brooker off. "What about the girl?" This explanation was more involved. Hyde studied some buttermilk cloud formations. He went for a walk, to the first base side of the diamond. The other FBI agent, whose name was Wellford, huddled with the gang near the backstop.
"None of what you're telling me makes any sense," Hyde complained angrily. He didn't feel well. The mad dash through time zones had left him with a headache his usual remedy couldn't handle. He'd been unable to cope with food all day. And something about the news of the girl shedding her clothes and vanishing impacted him at an even deeper, visceral level.
For several weeks Hyde had steeped himself in the accomplishments of psychics. Because of the extensive evidence compiled by his predecessor Carsten Burrows, he had become a reluctant believer in supernormal powers, at least the power demonstrated by Robin Sandza. Belief, he had found, was better than dread. But dread had returned, with a sting like death. What if Eden Waring possessed even more astonishing Gifts?
He gave Brooker a tongue-lashing, even though he wasn't sure his Frisco SAC deserved it. Hyde had the shudders. The Little Leaguers were racing each other toward the village center. Wellford approached Hyde with a smile he modified upon seeing the Director's face.
"They're good kids. I told them I spent four years in the high minors with the Orioles organization, until my arm gave out. Then I pulled my favorite weapon on them."
"You pulled your weapon, Agent Wellford?"
"I gave them some money for ice cream. Raymond Chandler used to say, 'My favorite weapon is a twenty-dollar bill.'"
"I don't think I know him."
"He wrote hard-boiled detective novels. My father collects them. And old radio shows. Boston Blackie. Sam Spade, Detective. Are you feeling okay, sir?" Robert Hyde had passed a hand over his face as if he were wiping away thick cobwebs.
"I've felt better. I'm going to take a walk, have a look around town on my own."
"Yes, sir. Do you want me to—"
"No, stay here and monitor all communications." Hyde took a couple of steps, hesitated, looked around at Wellford.
"Old radio shows. I don't make a habit of remembering my childhood, but there was a program I listened to with my father. It always came on during the hour I visited once a week. He was hospitalized for, they called it battle fatigue in those days. Now it's post-trauma stress disorder or something. He never recovered. I never heard him say my name. That's not what I was thinking about. There was this radio program, was it called The Whistler? He had the power to cloud men's minds."
"I believe that was Lamont Cranston. The Shadow. 'Who knows what evil lurks—'"
"The Shadow! You're right. It was The Shadow who clouded men's minds, so they couldn't see him. What foolishness. I only listened to the radio when I was with my father. I'm sure it was all he did. All day long. Stare at the wall in his little room at the VA hospital. Listen to the radio. Feeling—I don't know that he felt anything. My mother wouldn't let me hear those programs at home or go to the picture show. She said my imagination would be overstimulated, and I would wet the bed even worse. Her scorn. Worse than any whipping could have been, but she never laid a hand on me. So I learned that imagination is a bad thing. But that's not what I was thinking about, either. Why should I? I'm not a child anymore. I didn't enjoy being a child. Did you?"
"Yes, sir. I played a lot of ball."
"That's right. You played baseball. The Orioles organization. Good for you, Wellford. I think I'll take that walk now."
Nearly everyone in Valleyheart was at the bridge, or outside the ice cream shop half a block from the bridge, their attention focused on the comings and goings of law enforcement officers. Kids were scampering around. Another unit from the sheriff's department was now blocking access for inbound traffic on the west side of Valleyheart, which, except for some raft and canoe traffic on the river, had been effectively sealed off from the rest of the world.
The dpg's idea was to borrow something sturdy, a big pickup truck or a full-sized SUV, one with extra lights mounted over the windshield, and drive through the roadblock on the other side of town, lights flashing and horn blowing. Attract a lot of pursuit, draw them all away from Geoff's precarious hiding place. Then he would have to get to Moby Bay on his own. She was calling it quits for the day. Eden had become impatient, the dpg could feel her impatience although they had no direct line of communication. It was sort of an etheric wake-up call.
Valleyheart was a small place, the few side streets ending abruptly after a couple of blocks, or continuing as unpaved residential lanes with A-frames or log homes set on deep lots.
Beside a frame church in need of a fresh coat of white paint there was a parking lot where asphalt turned to gravel, and in the lot stood a lone Toyota Land Cruiser, shocked-up for hard mountain terrain. The LC probably hadn't been washed in six months; side windows were streaky with dried mud. It had an abandoned look. Just what she wanted, if the owner had left the Toyota unlocked and the keys handy. Valleyheart seemed to be the sort of place where people didn't bother to lock up their homes or vehicles.
The door on the driver's side wasn't tightly closed. The tinted dirty window was halfway down. Eden's dpg stepped up on the running board and looked in. A handful of keys lay on the driver's seat. She opened the door and scooped up the keys, settled herself.
The pit bull that had been left behind made only a grunting sound as it lunged toward her between the seats. She smelled it before she saw it, and with a yelp of terror she threw herself against the door and tumbled to the graveled ground outside. The pit bull, wearing a choke collar, leaped on top of her as she rolled over, clamping jaws with the grip of a bear trap on her right forearm below the elbow. Terrified, hurting so horribly she couldn't scream, the doppelganger was pinned flat on her back by the dog's paws. His ugly blunt head, jaws apart, jerked side to side as his teeth sank deeper into her paralyzed arm.
Eden Waring was carrying a wooden bowl of potato chips from the kitchen to the patio of the house that overlooked the Pacific when the shocking pain in her right forearm caused her to drop the bowl. She went down on one knee, holding the arm tightly with her other hand.
"Eden, you okay?" Chauncey McLain asked her.
"Cramp in my arm. Don't know where it came from. Look at the mess, I'm sorry."
"No problem, I'll pick up. Why don't you put a cold pack on your arm, there's a couple of them in the freezer."
"I'll get it f
or you," Roald McLain volunteered. He had developed a crush on Eden, and had been following her around worshipfully since the girls returned from the beach.
"Thanks," Eden said. She gritted her teeth, slumped on a redwood bench. Way too much pain. What was happening? Then she felt a jolt in the mind, a bumper-cars sort of collision with another mind, and the next instant it was as if she were falling, a thousand miles a second, out of the sky and through a grove of trees cool and darkly green, then shooting into unbearable light where the pain had its origin. All this while sitting on the redwood bench beneath the mesh sunshade of the patio, feeling the rough flagstones beneath her bare feet. Roald kneeling beside her to apply the cold pack where it hurt.
Get the dog off me, he's breaking my arm! I'm afraid of dogs! Pull me back, Eden!
"Thanks, Roald," Eden murmured, holding the cold pack in place. "It feels good. I need to go to the, uh, the bathroom. Be right back, guys."
In the bathroom she locked the door, then lifted the cold pack gingerly. Eden looked at her swelling forearm. Black and blue, the flesh torn by savage teeth.
Someone's coming! Pull me back!
Eden raised her eyes to the cabinet mirror over the sink; saw her own frantically twisting, naked body and a pit bull with her arm in its jaws.
She recoiled from this vision, shook her head angrily, looked again.
New perspective. She saw a man's face this time. In his middle to late fifties. Gray hair, crew cut. The hard-nosed, adversarial look of a man whose mind has long been closed to laughter. She had never seen him before. She would have remembered. Religious zealot, a destroyer of some kind. Egotist in a stark stone mask. But there was a childlike horror in his eyes belying the stonework when he stared back at Eden, as if his emotional surge protector was failing. His tan looked tarnished.
"All right," Eden said. She gritted her teeth against the pain in her arm and continued, "Just what the hell is going on here?"
He trembled; or it might have been the instability, the thin dimension of his image disturbed by mountain wind.
"This can't be. You can't—you don't exist."
"Not within the bounds of your reality," Eden said indifferently. "Now would you do something about this pit bull?"
"What?"
"Are you dense? He'll chew my arm off. Do you have a gun?" It was just a hunch on her part, but he nodded, slowly.
"Then take out your gun, mister, and shoot the goddamn dog!"
He looked down. His hand went beneath his coat. But he didn't pull his piece. He looked into her eyes again.
"Where is he? What have you done with my son?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know you."
He was beginning to look like living proof that there is life after death. "But where are you? I can't see you! I might hit you."
Enough of this, Eden decided. She was far away from him, but somehow she understood that she could do it. Put his panicky resistance on hold. Take control of his thoughts, his actions. Her exhilaration had the power of a celestial storm, a great Pacific wave reaching the shore. She rode this wave; surfing into his mind ...
"You killed my dog! Son of a bitch, what did you go and shoot my dog for?" Robert Hyde discovered what it was like to almost jump out of your skin.
He felt something stir in his mind, creepily, like a deathwatch beetle. He was looking at the body of the pit bull, shot between the eyes with the Glock 21C he was holding, half of its head in bloody fragments. He turned. There were two men converging on him, backwoods dwellers with unkempt shoulder-length hair, outrage in their eyes. Behind them FBI agents running full tilt to the scene. But he could handle this.
"Your dog attacked me. I had to shoot him."
"Buster never attacked nobody, and that's God's own truth, mister! I ought to kick your ass from here to—"
"Let's don't do anything rash, boys."
The dog owner's buddy, looking around, blanched at the sight of automatic weapons aimed their way, dug in his heels, and pulled at the other man's arm.
"Harris—"
Hyde was able to holster his weapon after two tries. There was no expression on his face. His brain felt like the moon lying empty in black space, a husk of something once fruitful.
"Not within the bounds of your reality," he heard Eden Waring say once again.
The dog owner was down on one knee, picking up the remains of his pit bull.
"Aww, Buster." He began to sob. "Goddamn guvmint assholes. Shoot a man's dog and walk away. Just like Ruby Ridge, ain't it? Well piss on you, bastard. Piss on all a you!"
Agent Wellford holstered his own gun and looked at the Director. "Gave us a scare, sir."
"Have you found my son yet?"
"No, sir. Sheriff may have something. He says."
"Let's talk to him."
Eden felt very tired. The swelling had disappeared from her arm. She sat crying softly on the edge of the bathtub. "Is that all of it?"
"Yes."
"Riley ... Betts. I've got to get home. Now."
"In my opinion," her doppelganger said, "that's not a very good idea."
Knock on the door. It was Chauncey McLain.
"You okay in there?"
"Yes. Sure, Chauncey."
"Party's started. You must be starved, girl."
"Be right with you."
Eden reached for a washcloth, ran cold water in the tub, bathed her face and cooled her throbbing eyes, then balled the cloth and hurled it wrathfully.
"Geoff," she moaned. "How could he? I owe him. Oh, God, do I ever owe that bastard, and he will get what's coming to him."
"Maybe you shouldn't judge him too harshly."
"Will you shut up?"
"Just trying to be the voice of reason here. I know how upset you are."
"Shut up now. I mean it. I don't want to talk anymore. I have to think. It's so horrible. Yesterday. I just want to go back to yesterday, wake up in my bed, iron my graduation gown again, go over my speech. I want my diploma, damn it, I earned it! If I have such great powers, then why don't I have the power to do that?"
"There are some physical laws we can't transcend. You need to brush your hair."
Eden brushed without looking at herself in the mirror. Unable to endure herself any longer. Or her doppelganger.
"Leave me alone now."
"Here's an idea. I could put on your clothes and join the party, give you a chance to rest and collect your thoughts."
"Like hell you will," Eden said, yanking the brush bristles through her unruly hair.
As soon as the first helicopter flew over and landed in front of Valleyheart's Chevron station, Geoff decided that he should forget about whatever Eden's doppelganger had in mind and get moving. She had told him where to find Eden. That was all he needed from her, or it. He was still in a state of high confusion—weirded-out probably better described his emotional level—whenever he thought about the dpg. It was useful to think about nothing else except the urgency of getting to Moby Bay. The state cops had made him, and the roads were tied up. Reacquiring his car wasn't an option. But there was a river below, swift and bright in the sun. He had seen canoeists, kayakers, and rafters on the river. And the Burnt Oak, he was sure, ran to the sea on its northerly course down from the mountains. With luck, the mouth of the river would be near Moby Bay.
No way down but the hard way. It wasn't a sheer drop, but the angle of descent was steep. Mossy ledges and ravines crisscrossed with deadfalls, sparse sunlight beneath the tall trees. There was no clear path to follow.
Getting down to the river was one thing. Then he would need a canoe.
The Ford Expedition Tom Sherard had rented in San Francisco came equipped with a telephone. They were a half hour out of Innisfall after an emergency visit to a veterinarian's when the phone rang. Sherard glanced at Bertie Nkambe, who seemed as startled as he was. Warhol, the cleaned-up Persian cat, was wrapped in a soft baby blanket on her lap, dozing after a hefty shot of antibiotic.
; "Who knows where we are?" Sherard said.
"Nobody. Oh, wait. I did order a large thin-crust with anchovies and three kinds of cheese from the Flying Pizza delivery service. 'Pies from the Sky'? It's big country up here. Oh, smile, damn you."
Sherard smiled. "I don't like anchovies."
"They're for Warhol. Maybe you should answer the stupid phone, Tom."
"I know I'll bloody well regret this," he grumbled, putting the caller on speakerphone.
"Am I talking to Jungle Jim, the man with the gold lion's-head cane?" Danny Cheng. Sherard shook his head in amazement and annoyance.
Bertie said delightedly, "Is this the man with the bad gas leak?" Cheng's voice was raw and strained, as if he'd eaten a lot of smoke.
"The leaks have been stopped for now. We won't go into names, places, or past regrets on this broadcast. I'm all business today. You're really not too tall for me, you know. I can deal with six feet of long legs, bold haughty buttocks, breasts that blush like ripened pears in their warm dish of cinnamon briilee."
"I'm six-one in flats. Is your father okay?"
After a coughing fit Cheng said, "And sends his best."
"How did you find us?" Sherard asked.
"Please. I'm the Infomaniac. Being burned out of my house hasn't cramped my style. I thought you might have had a change of heart and acted on the nudge I gave you. Then you'd need wheels to get around."
"I wish I had better news for you," Bertie said. "But all I have is a cat."
"A cat?"
"A survivor everyone else overlooked. Boy kitty. Name's Warhol, according to the tag on his collar. There's a definite resemblance. Anyway, I get along well with cats. This one belonged to someone we talked about last night. American Indian name. That's about all I've been able to get so far. Warhol's been through hell, and right now he just wants to sleep. Later I may have information you can use. Where are you?"
Cheng cleared his throat and coughed deeply. "Safe place. The country hacienda of a great American. There are a few left who can't be bought or intimidated. You might remember meeting him last night. He was very impressed with you, tall girl. He'd like to continue the conversation you were having about another valuable public servant whose luck has been running ugly. I'm talking about rearry rotten ruck, like there's a fix in by someone near and dear to the public servant under discussion."