“Okay, okay, don’t bark my head off.” The gun slipped back in his pocket. “I’m just saying, the thing works.”
“But it didn’t work inside, did it?” said Nickie, getting in the car.
Wooly took the driver’s side. “I’m gonna get it checked out, the mechanism or whatever. I mean, I don’t know what kind of mind games she was playing in there, and I don’t even want to know, fucking freak of nature.”
Seconds later we passed through the camouflage of Georgiana’s concealed driveway and were back in the real world. “It’s obvious,” said Wooly, “she’s trying to trap me. She’s setting some trap up on me. But, thing is, I know it now. I know what she’s up to.”
Halfway back to his house he was still on his rant. “I’m asking myself, what’s her problem? She’s deranged? She’s sick? She’s bitter? I think you could go any of those ways with her and still be right. What I think her—“ He hit the brakes and came to a stop. “What the fuck is that?”
It was a huge lizard in the middle of the road, nearly three feet long. The thing evidently had crawled out of the woods and had gotten run over while it was trying to cross.
I got out. Somebody had to move the carcass, drag it off to the side. Nickie and Wooly approached it with me.
It was ugly. The slick, scaly body was crushed flat in the middle by a tire track. Its eyes were closed in death and its long tongue was still flapped out of its mouth.
“Holy shit,” Nickie said slowly, not with disgust but with realization. “Holy shit. The dragon will stop you in the middle of the road.”
“What?” Said Wooly.
“The dragon will stop you. It’s what she said. It’s just what she said.”
“Wait,” said Wooly. “What did she say? What did she exactly say?”
“Watch out for the dragon in the road. When you leave the gate, the dragon will stop you.”
Wooly’s head moved with a dull nod. “Not on the side of the road. In the middle.”
Nitrogen ice is one of the coldest substances in the core of the earth. I felt like I had 18 pounds of it flowing through my blood stream.
For once Wooly had nothing to say. He didn’t have to say anything—the meaning of this thing was pretty damn clear. We kept staring down at the ghost-creature. A lizard, a dragon, a half-curled reptilian tongue. I could almost say I was starting to slide into a dream, but that wasn’t it. Just the opposite, in fact. I felt like I was sliding into a moment of revelation. I felt like all the questions were about to be answered, like all the secrets were about to be told.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 5
WORD FOR FUCKING WORD
>>MONDAY JUNE 18 (3 days to go)
MONDAY JUNE 18, 10:00 a.m.
YOU CAN LOOK IT UP
Here’s a prediction even I could’ve made: Wooly was in some mood after the slain-dragon encounter. Soon as he got home he stomped into the living room and pulled Georgiana’s photo off the wall. “Fuck this thing. I don’t care what I paid for it.” Only the intercession of Genevieve, saying she’d put it in storage, prevented him from trash-smashing the thing to pieces. His bad case of the jitters stayed with him through the rest of the day. “I always knew something like this was going to happen,” he said over dinner. “I didn’t know what it was, what it would be, not exactly, but I always knew it would be like this.”
Next morning we found him slumped at the kitchen table, Genevieve flitting around him like a worried moth. Not only was he slit-eyed tired but shadows seemed to have grown into his face. The shadows weren’t just from exhaustion. You can see coloring like that if you peek inside a closed casket.
An empty glass filmed with orange juice residue sat in front of him. Eggs, milk and cereal stood on the counter but he didn’t want anything. Something about him suggested he’d been sitting in the same spot for a long time, maybe for hours.
Genevieve was biting her lip so hard it looked like she was about to bleed. “I’m tired of all this fortune telling shit, all this occult spitunia. You think she can tell the future? Anybody can tell the future.”
“Really,” said Wooly.
“You want to know what the future’s going to bring? The sun will die and the earth will perish. You can look it up.”
“Yeah, but how about a little before that? How about like three days from now, cause that’s when she says I’m going to die.”
Wooly told us he’d made an emergency appointment with his doctor, 1:30. “What if it’s in me?” he said. “What if the death is coming from inside? I want to make sure it isn’t. I have to take every precaution.”
Genevieve was pacing along the counter now, picking things up—the milk, the cereal—and putting them down again. “Maybe she said some things that maybe seemed to come true, that could be. But that doesn’t mean everything she said’s going to come true.”
“Yeah?” said Wooly. “Can you guarantee it? Can you get it in writing?”
“No, but I can tell you to take it down some, stop torturing yourself. I’m here—you know that. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
She came over to him, stroked his head, moved her hands through his hair.
He tried to drink from his empty glass. “I can’t stand this.”
“You’ve got to stop obsessing like this.”
“How? You tell me how, I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know. All I know is you can’t go on like this.”
“Exactly.” He threw up his hands in complete despair. “That’s the whole fucking point.”
>>>>>>
MONDAY JUNE 18, 1:15 p.m.
THE COLOR OF THE UNIVERSE
Nickie patted him down for his Beretta before we left. He was clean, but now he had something to talk about as he drove us to town. “Remember that time I tried to snuff myself? I told you about it. Put the Beretta in my mouth, hit a bad tooth?”
“Right,” I said, “and your car died on the way to the dentist. Which is how you got lost in the woods and found the rock.”
“You know something? When I hit the tooth that night, I should’ve ignored the pain and pulled the trigger.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh I’m gonna say it. Let me get you told, I’m gonna say exactly that. I would’ve been better off. I’m losing my mind here.”
“Yeah, or maybe you’re giving it away.”
He ignored me as we hit downtown traffic. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that his doctor was located in the Hidden Valley Executive Center. Lots of people have offices there. Monte Slater, for one. But so did plenty of doctors.
Wooly turned the corner and found a parking spot just past the fried chicken place, Wings ‘N Things. We started walking, though he was lagging three steps behind, moving a lot slower than normal. I was almost thinking we’d have to hold him up.
“It’s the heat out today,” he said. “Too much weather for me.”
Swinging through the building’s revolving door weirded me out a bit. Strange going back to the site of Monte’s suicide. Stranger still when we got in the elevator and Wooly pressed five.
“We’re late,” said Nickie, pointing to the digital display on the elevator wall. The date is June 18, the current time is 1:38.
“You know what?” said Wooly. “I don’t care. I’m in no hurry. I’m in no hurry to use up what time that’s left.”
The doors opened. He got out and, yeah, he turned in the direction of Monte’s office. Okay, that was a 50/50 chance. But then he kept walking toward the far end of the corridor, passing door after door, heading for the same place where the crime tape had been strung. This was just bizarre. I could feel blood drop from my head. What was going on?
Then he stopped at the door right next to Trident Manufacturing, just a few feet away. His doctor’s name—Jeevika Mhari—was among the seven listed on the door.
The waiting room was busy, but Wooly, eight minutes late, would be taken right away. Nickie and I conferred: Sh
ould one of us go in with him? Which one wanted to see him naked? We decided he’d be fine on his own.
We found seats once Wooly was taken inside. The walls of the waiting room were painted a light green, exactly halfway between aquamarine and turquoise. I’d once read that if you could somehow stand outside the universe and see it from a distance, it would have a color halfway between aquamarine and turquoise. The universe, in another words, looked just like this doctors’ office in Hidden Lake.
Fifteen minutes later, Wooly still inside, the waiting room was almost empty. Typical doctors’ office ebb and flow. One of the two nurses at the counter left and came back a few minutes later with lunch. Nickie and I experimented with new positions for our legs.
The nurse ate at the counter, surrounded by folders and charts waiting to be filed. “I saw that guy from next door this morning,” she said to the other nurse. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“Terrible, terrible. I think they’re burying him tomorrow.”
They were talking, I knew, about Monte’s funeral.
“What was I suppose to say?”
Nothing more was said after that.
Another nurse came out, evidently a superior. She started saying what’s going on—you took your lunch break too early. You’re not supposed to take it until 2:30.
“So what do you want me to do?” the offender said. “Stop eating my tunafish?”
Wooly came out a moment later. He looked a bit better. There was almost a look of relief on his face, at least a trace of it.
“Okay, this is something,” he said as we left. “There’s nothing wrong with me. My health is good—you know, considering my weight, the way I abused myself. But I’m all right. She says I’m all right.”
“That is something,” I said.
He nodded, pressed for the elevator. “Least I know, whatever’s gonna happen, it’s not coming from within, you know?”
We got in. He pressed the first floor button.
“Did you tell her why you’re here?”
“I didn’t bring it up. Why bother? She already thinks I’m crazy, why add to her…”
Whatever was headed for his tongue, it got lost in his throat. We looked over at him. His mouth was gaping open and he was staring at the digital display.
The date is June 18, the current time is 00:00. The zeroes were flashing. The thing was busted. This was the same elevator we’d taken before and the clock had been working then. Not now.
“It’s stopped,” he said. “Time—it’s stopped. What did she say? What the fuck did she say? Time will stop for you. Time will stop. When the offering of the fish is consumed, time will stop.” He glanced around the elevator, confused. “That woman—the one in the office. What was she eating? Was that tunafish?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t collapse against the corner wall—he just backed up and gently slumped into it. When he looked at the clock again, his eyes were glazed over. “Word for word. Word for fucking word.”
My body suddenly felt as light as Styrofoam
The doors opened. Ground floor. People were waiting to get on. Nickie and I stepped out but he didn’t. He couldn’t move. The people were staring at him—well?—but he couldn’t bring himself to move.
I remembered taking the tour of his lab, him showing us that last room with one Xenon arc light glaring on three old samples. He was still testing them for his own amusement. There’s just something fascinating about disintegration, he’d said, watching something fall apart with the passage of time.
The way he was now, he’d make a nice case study for himself.
>>>>>>
MONDAY JUNE 18, 2:10 p.m.
JOY TO THE WORLD
We finally got him out of there, got him out on the street. “I keep hearing her voice,” he said. “Keep hearing her words. Time will fucking stop. The fucking fish. I keep hearing ‘em in my head.”
“Let’s keep moving,” said Nickie.
Lunch seekers were still on the streets, though there were no tourists today. The sidewalk wasn’t so crowded, but Wooly’s pace was even slower than before. He didn’t seem to want to be bothered with moving his legs. We kept trying to hustle him along, on the lookout again for a green Ford Fusion.
“I was feeling good there for a moment,” he said. “The doctor? I was feeling good for just a moment, just a second. But it never fails, does it? Never. You just finish scrubbing the bowl, and that’s when you have to take a massive diarrhea shit.”
We made it closer to the Wings ‘N Things corner. An old man in a wheelchair, blue and red Yankee cap on his head, was sitting by the side of the restaurant, looking out at the traffic. Just as we were passing by, he broke into song.
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven, and hea-ven, and nature sing
He was doing Joy to the World. Middle of June, he was singing Joy to the World in a loud, almost shouting voice.
“This is just what I need,” Wooly said as we walked past. “Gimme something to gag him.”
We turned the corner. The melody followed.
JOY to the world, the Lord is come
Let earth receive her KING
“The fucking people in this fucking town,” said Wooly. “Could this day get any worse?”
You had to ask.
Way down the street I saw an SUV going in reverse against the traffic. Doing 25-30 miles per hour. Jerk of a driver, I thought, and kept walking. Moments later I heard some nerve-jump sound and the entire plate glass window of Wings ‘N Things behind us turned to frost.
Nickie whipped her head around so fast her face was blurred. I followed her eyes to the SUV, a Grand Cherokee, stopped in the road now. I saw someone standing next to it, saw a muzzle flash. The whole restaurant window shattered and fell, the people inside starting to go to the floor like puppets whose strings had suddenly been cut.
“Get down!” Nickie yelled, pushing Wooly to the pavement. I dropped too. We did spider scrambles to the car, using the Lexus loaner as a shield.
The sniper shots scattered everywhere, hitting the glass in other stores, grazing the roof of the car. People on the sidewalk were running and tripping, jumping for cover, screaming and shouting. Drowsy heat had turned into a white nightmare.
Wooly was face down, hands over his head. “What is this, like the town sport? Some frucking fruit opens fire?”
He couldn’t even say fucking right. Bad sign.
I edged my head an inch past the bumper. The Grand Cherokee was maybe 200 feet away, the guy with the high-caliber rifle standing there like a hawk, all in black. A ski mask?
More shots. I slipped back, my heart thrashing like a fly trapped in a closed window, wings beating against the screen.
Nickie took her Smith & Wesson out. I dittoed with the Glock. We started returning cautious fire. No chance of reaching him at this distance, but at least we could show him there was some defense here.
“Too bad,” said Wooly, “I don’t have my gun.”
“Shut up!” said Nickie.
We heard a door slam, an engine going into hard rev. Nickie held her breath and raised her head. The Grand Cherokee had left a trail of exhaust on the street.
Wooly rolled over on his back. “I got a lot of depression,” he said, “to catch up on.”
>>>>>>
MONDAY JUNE 18, 2:35 p.m.
THE MORE THE MERRIER
Like real estate, the value of Wooly-shooting depends on location. You try it in his front yard, or on a side road, or in the parking lot of his lab, that’s one thing. But when it happens in the middle of town, that’s something else. Even the two Hidden Lake cops didn’t seem bored any longer. They actually looked studious and attentive as they checked the crowd for injuries and took statements, though they were still moving cow-fast.
“What are you doing to this town?” Alex Tarkashian said.
“You’re asking what I’m doing?” said Wooly, so jumpy he could
n’t stop his hands from shaking. “I think you got it vighsa-versa.”
Onlookers were still mobbing both sides of the street, staying back but remaining curious. One shaken Wings ‘N Things customer was doubled over in the doorway, throwing up on the steps.
“So no Ford Fusion this time?” said Alex.
“A Grand Cherokee,” said Nickie.
“Color?”
“Black.”
“Or maybe dark blue,” I said.
“Plate?”
“Too far away,” said Nickie.
“About 200 feet.”
“A ski mask again?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“This is just brilliant.”
One of the cops came over, lighting a cigarette. “Nobody saw more than shit,” he complained.
Alex looked back at us. “So what’s the thinking? Your perp’s switched vehicles?”
“Or there’s more than one,” said Nickie.
“Kidding.”
“She could be right,” said Wooly. “There could be more than one. It could be a plot. It could be a fucking conspiracy.”
Alex let out a sad, long-day sigh. “Does it ever stop with you? Ever?”
>>>>>>
MONDAY JUNE 18, 3:25 p.m.
JUST LIKE THAT—SHE’S DEAD
Genevieve took one look at him—lost, out of it, repeating the words time and fish and conspiracy over and over to himself—and she made up her mind. “Wooly, the rock.” The two of us set out on the same paths we’d taken four long days ago, the woods all furred with shade, heading toward the swamp reeds and tannin waters of the original hidden lake.
“It’s like everything’s moving too fast,” he said. “I try to hang onto things they just keep moving away from me.”
“You mean today?”
“I mean everything, my whole life. It’s like my whole life went by when I wasn’t looking. It’s like, I’m standing here, I’m running out of memories.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 8