Every time he went into a convenience store, Harry thought of Ricky Estefan stopping after work that day for a quart of milk — and buying a drastic life change instead. But nothing bad happened in the 7-Eleven, except that he heard the story about the baby and the birthday party.
A small television on the check-out counter kept the clerk entertained when business was slow, and it was turned to the news while Harry was paying for his purchases. A young mother in Chicago had been charged with murdering her own infant child. Her relatives had planned a big birthday party for her, but when her babysitter failed to show up, it had looked as if she wouldn’t be able to go and enjoy herself. So she dumped her two-month-old infant down the chute of her apartment-building trash incinerator, went to the party, and danced up a storm. Her lawyer had already said her defense would be postpartum depression.
Yet another example of the continuing crisis for Connie’s collection of outrages and atrocities.
The clerk was a slender young man with dark, sorrowful eyes. In Iranian-accented English, he said, “What’s this country coming to?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Harry said. “But then again, in your former country, they don’t just let the lunatics run around free, they actually put them in charge.”
“True,” the clerk said. “But here, too, sometimes.”
“Can’t argue that.”
As he was pushing through one of the two glass doors on his way out of the store, with the bread and mustard in a plastic bag, Harry suddenly realized he was carrying a folded newspaper under his right arm. He stopped with the door half open, took the paper from under his arm, and stared at it uncomprehendingly. He was sure he had not picked up a paper, let alone folded one and put it under his arm.
He returned to the cash register. When he put the paper on the counter, it unfolded.
“Did I pay for this?” Harry asked.
Puzzled, the clerk said, “No, sir. I didn’t even see you pick it up.”
“I don’t remember picking it up.”
“Did you want it?”
“No, not really.”
Then he noticed the headline at the top of the front page: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT. And the subhead: TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED. It was the late edition with the first story about Ordegard’s bloody rampage.
“Wait,” Harry said. “Yes. Yes, I guess I’ll take it.”
On those occasions when one of his cases became newsworthy, Harry never read about himself in the papers. He was a cop, not a celebrity.
He gave the clerk a quarter and took the evening edition.
He still didn’t understand how the paper had gotten folded and tucked under his arm. Blackout? Or something stranger, more directly related to the other inexplicable events of the day?
* * *
When Harry opened the front door and, dripping, stepped into the foyer of his condominium, home had never seemed so inviting. It was a neat and ordered haven, into which the chaos of the outside world could not intrude.
He took off his shoes. They were saturated, probably ruined. He should have worn galoshes, but the weather report had not called for rain until after nightfall.
His socks were wet, too, but he left them on. He would mop the foyer tile after he changed into clean, dry clothes.
He stopped in the kitchen to put the bread and mustard on the counter beside the cutting board. Later he would make sandwiches with some cold poached chicken. He was starved.
The kitchen sparkled. He was so pleased that he had taken the time to clean up the breakfast mess before going to work. He would have been depressed to see it now.
From the kitchen he went through the dining room, down the short hall to the master bedroom, carrying the evening newspaper. As he crossed the threshold, he snapped on the lights — and discovered the hobo on his bed.
Alice never fell down any rabbit hole deeper than the one into which Harry dropped at the sight of the vagrant.
The man seemed even bigger than he had been out of doors or from a distance in the Special Projects corridor. Dirtier. More hideous. He did not have the semi-transparency of an apparition; in fact, with his masses of tangled hair and intricately layered varieties of grime and webwork of scars, with his dark clothes so wrinkled and tattered that they recalled the interment wrappings of an ancient Egyptian mummy, he was more real than the room itself, like a painstakingly detailed figure painted by a photorealist and then inserted into a minimalist’s line-drawing of a room.
The tramp’s eyes opened. Like pools of blood.
He sat up and said, “You think you’re so special. But you’re just one more animal, walking meat like all the rest of them.”
Dropping the newspaper, pulling his revolver from his shoulder holster, Harry said, “Don’t move.”
Ignoring the warning, the intruder swung his legs over the side of the bed, got up.
The impression of the vagrant’s head and body remained in the spread, pillows, and mattress. A ghost could walk through snow, leaving no footprints, and hallucinations had no weight.
“Just another diseased animal.” If anything, the vagrant’s voice was deeper and raspier than it had been on the street in Laguna Beach, the guttural voice of a beast that had laboriously learned to talk. “Think you’re a hero, don’t you? Big man. Big hero. Well, you’re nothing, less than a pissant, that’s what you are. Nothing!”
Harry couldn’t believe it was going to happen again, not twice in one day, and for God’s sake not in his own home.
Backing up one step into the doorway, he said, “You don’t lie down on the floor right now, on your face, hands behind your back, right now, so help me God I’ll blow your head off.”
Starting around the bed toward Harry, the vagrant said, “You think you can shoot anyone you like, push anyone around if you want to, and that’s the end of it, but that’s not the end of it with me, shooting me is never the end of it.”
“Stop, right now, I mean it!”
The intruder didn’t stop. His moving shadow was huge on the wall. “Rip your guts out, hold them in your face, make you smell them while you die.”
Harry had the revolver in both hands. A shooter’s stance. He knew what he was doing. He was a good marksman. He could have hit a flitting hummingbird at such close range, let alone this great looming hulk, so there was only one way it could end, the intruder as cold as a side of beef, blood all over the walls, only one plausible scenario — yet he felt in greater danger than ever before in his life, infinitely more vulnerable than he had been among the mannequins in the box-maze attic.
“You people,” the vagrant said, rounding the foot of the bed, “are so much fun to play with.”
One last time, Harry ordered him to stop.
But he kept coming, maybe ten feet away, eight, six.
Harry opened fire, squeezing shots off nice and smooth, not letting the hard recoil of the handgun pull the muzzle off target, once, twice, three times, four, and the explosions were deafening in the small bedroom. He knew every round did damage, three in the torso, the fourth in the base of the throat from only inches more than arm’s length, causing the head to snap around as if doing a comic double take.
The hobo didn’t go down, didn’t stagger backward, only jerked with each hit he took. Inflicted point-blank, the throat wound was ghastly. The bullet must have punched all the way through, leaving an even worse exit wound in the back of the neck, fracturing or severing the spine, but there was no blood, no spray or spout or smallest spurt, as if the man’s heart had stopped beating long ago and all the blood had dried and hardened in his vessels. He kept coming, no more stoppable than an express train, rammed into Harry, knocking the wind out of him, lifting him, carrying him backward through the doorway, slamming him so hard against the far hallway wall that Harry’s teeth snapped together with an audible clack and the revolver flipped out of his hand.
Pain spread like a Japanese accordion fan from the small of Harry’s back across both shoulders. For a momen
t he thought he was going to black out, but terror kept him conscious. Pinned to the wall, feet dangling off the floor, stunned by the plaster-cracking force with which he’d been hammered, he was as helpless as a child in the iron grip of his assailant. But if he could remain conscious, his strength might flood back into him, or maybe he would think of something to save himself, anything, a move, a trick, a distraction.
The hobo leaned against Harry, crushing him. The nightmarish face loomed closer. The livid scars were encircled by enlarged pores the size of match heads, packed with filth. Tufts of wiry black hair bristled from his flared nostrils.
When the man exhaled, it was like a mass grave venting the gases of decomposition, and Harry choked in revulsion.
“Scared, little man?” the vagrant asked, and his ability to speak seemed unaffected by the hole in his throat and the fact that his vocal cords had been pulverized and blown out through the back of his neck. “Scared?”
Harry was scared, yes, he would have been an idiot if he hadn’t been scared. No amount of weapons training or police work prepared you for going face to face with the boogeyman, and he didn’t mind admitting it, was prepared to shout it from a rooftop if that’s what the vagrant wanted, but he couldn’t get his breath to speak.
“Sunrise in eleven hours,” the hobo said. “Ticktock.”
Things were moving in the depths of the tramp’s bushy beard. Crawling. Maybe bugs.
He shook Harry fiercely, rattling him against the wall.
Harry tried to bring his arms up between them, break the big man’s hold. It was like trying to force concrete to yield.
“First everything and everyone you love,” the vagrant snarled.
Then he turned, still holding Harry, and threw him back through the bedroom doorway.
Harry hit the floor hard and rolled into the side of the bed.
“Then you!”
Gasping and dazed, Harry looked up and saw the hobo filling the doorway, watching him. The revolver was at the big man’s feet. He kicked it into the room, toward Harry, and it spun to a stop on the carpet, just out of reach.
Harry wondered if he could get to the gun before the bastard came down on him. Wondered if there was any point trying. Four shots, four hits, no blood.
“Did you hear me?” the vagrant demanded. “Did you hear me? Did you hear me, hero? Did you hear me?” He didn’t pause for an answer, kept repeating the question in an increasingly angry and curiously mocking tone of voice, louder, louder still, “Did you hear me, hero? Did you hear me, did you hear me, did you hear me, hear me, hear me? Did you hear me? DID YOU HEAR ME, DID YOU, DID YOU, DID YOU, HERO, DID YOU, DID YOU?”
The hobo was trembling violently, and his face was dark with rage and hatred. He wasn’t even looking at Harry any longer, but at the ceiling, howling the words—“DID YOU HEAR ME, DID YOU HEAR ME?”—as if his fury had become so enormous that one man could no longer be a satisfactory target for it, screaming at the whole world or even worlds beyond, voice oscillating between bass thunder and a piercing shriek.
Harry tried to get to his feet by supporting himself against the bed.
The vagrant raised his right hand, and green static electricity crackled between his fingers. Light shimmered in the air above his palm, and suddenly his hand was on fire.
He snapped his wrist and flung a fireball across the room. It hit the drapes, and they exploded into flames.
His eyes were not red liquid pools any longer. Instead, fire licked out of the sockets, lapping up over his eyebrows, as though he was just the hollow figure of a man, made of wicker, burning from the inside out.
Harry was on his feet. His legs were shaky.
All he wanted was to get out of there. Burning drapes covered the window. The hobo was in the doorway. No exit.
The vagrant turned and snapped his wrist in the manner of a magician revealing a dove, and another white-hot churning sphere spun across the room, smashed into the dresser, burst like a Molotov cocktail, showering flames. The dresser mirror shattered. Wood split, drawers popped open, and the conflagration spread.
Smoke curled out of his beard, and fire spat from his nostrils. His hooked nose blistered and began to melt. His mouth was open in a shout, but the only sounds he made were the hiss, pop, and crackle of combustion. He exhaled a pyrotechnic cascade, sparks in all the colors of the rainbow, and then flames shot from his mouth. His lips curled up as crisp as deep-fried pork rinds, turned black, and peeled back from smouldering teeth.
Harry saw snakes of flame wriggle up the wall from the dresser and onto the ceiling. In places the carpet was burning.
Already the heat was tremendous. Soon the air would be full of acrid smoke.
Bright flares squirted out of the three bullet holes in the vagrant’s chest, red and gold fire instead of blood. He flicked his wrist once more, and a third bright sputtering globe erupted from his hand.
The hissing mass streaked at Harry. He dropped into a crouch. It passed over his head, so close that he protected his face with one arm and cried out when the wake of searing heat washed over him. The bedclothes erupted into flames as if they had been soaked in gasoline.
When Harry looked up, the doorway was empty. The vagrant was gone.
He scooped the revolver off the floor and rushed into the hall, with the carpet sprouting flames around his stockinged feet. He was glad his socks were sopping wet.
The hallway was deserted, which was good, because he didn’t want another confrontation with… with whatever the hell he’d just had a confrontation with, not if bullets didn’t work. The kitchen to his left. He hesitated, then stepped in front of the doorway, gun at the ready. Fire eating the cabinets, curtains flapping like the skirts of dancers in Hell, smoke rolling toward him. He kept moving. The foyer ahead, living room to the right, where the thing must have gone, thing not hobo. He was reluctant to pass the archway, afraid the thing would plunge out at him, seize him in its incandescent hands, but he had to get out fast, the place was filling with smoke, and he was coughing, unable to draw enough clean air.
Edging to the foyer with his back against the hallway wall, facing the arch, Harry kept the gun in front of him, more because of training and habit than because he had any faith in its efficacy. Anyway, only one round remained in the cylinder.
The living room was burning, too, and in the middle stood the fiery figure, fully engulfed, arms spread wide to embrace the torrid tempest, consumed by it yet obviously in no pain, perhaps even in a state of rapture. Each lambent caress of flame seemed to be a source of perverse pleasure to the thing.
Harry was sure that it was watching him from within its shrouds of fire. He was afraid it might suddenly approach, arms still in a cruciform posture, to pin him against the wall again.
He crabbed sideways past the archway into the small foyer, as a black tide of smothering, blinding smoke rolled down the hall from the bedroom and submerged him. The last thing Harry saw was his soggy shoes, and he snatched them up in the same hand with which he held the gun. The smoke was so dense that no light penetrated to the foyer even from the leaping flames behind him. Anyway, his eyes stung and flooded with tears; he was forced to squeeze them tight shut. In the tarry blackness, there was a danger of becoming disoriented, even in such a small space.
He held his breath. One inhalation would be toxic enough to bring him to his knees, choking, dizzy. But he hadn’t been getting clean air since the master bedroom, so he wasn’t going to be able to hold out long, a few seconds. Even as he scooped up the shoes, he grabbed for the doorknob, couldn’t find it in the darkness, fumbled, began to panic, but closed his left hand around it. Locked. Dead-bolt latch. His lungs were hot, as if fire had gotten into them. Chest ached. Where was the dead-bolt? Should be above the knob. He wanted to breathe, found the dead-bolt, had to breathe, couldn’t, disengaged the lock, was aware of a growing inner darkness more dangerous than the outer one, grasped the knob, tore the door open, plunged outside. The smoke was still around him, sucked o
ut by the cool night, and he had to weave to the right to find clean air, the first breath of which was painfully icy in his lungs.
In the garden courtyard, where walkways wound among azaleas and plum-thorn hedges and lush beds of English primrose, with the U-shaped building around him, Harry blinked furiously, clearing his vision. He saw a few neighbors coming out of their apartments onto the lower promenade, and above were two people on the second-story promenade by which all of the upper apartments were accessed. They’d probably been drawn by the gunfire, because it was not a neighborhood where that sound was common. They were staring in shock at him and at the plumes of oily smoke churning out of his front door, but he didn’t think he’d heard anybody yelling “fire,” so he began to shout it, and then the others picked up the cry.
Harry sprinted to one of the two alarm boxes along the ground-floor promenade. He dropped his gun and shoes, and yanked down the lever that broke the fogged glass. Bells clanged stridently.
To his right the living-room window of his own condo, which faced the courtyard, blew out and showered glass onto the concrete deck of the promenade. Smoke followed, and whipping pennants of fire, and Harry expected to see the burning man climb out through the broken window and continue the pursuit.
Crazily, a line from a movie theme song flashed through his mind: Who you gonna call? GHOSTBUSTERS!
He was living in a Dan Aykroyd movie. He might have found it funny if he hadn’t been so scared that his thudding heart was halfway up his throat.
Sirens rose in the distance, fast approaching.
He ran from door to door, pounding with his fists on each. More soft explosions. A strange metallic screech. Ceaselessly clanging alarm bells. Sequenced bursts of shattering glass rang like hundreds of wind chimes hammered by an erratically gusting storm. Harry didn’t look back for the source of any of the sounds, kept moving from door to door.
When the sirens grew to dominate all other sounds and seemed to be only a couple of blocks away, he was finally confident that everyone in the building had been alerted and gotten out. People were scattered across the courtyard garden, staring up at the roof or watching the street for the fire engines, horrified and scared, stunned silent or weeping.
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