He felt Kittle’s hands on him now, cupping his chin roughly, felt the man’s knee dig into his spine. There’d be one sudden movement, Deal knew, one electric bolt of pain despite any effort he could make, no matter how hard he fought to hold his chin steady…and his neck would snap and all this would end.
What he felt was not fear. Only sadness and despair. Arch, he thought. And Janice. Some soldier he’d been. Kittle’s grip tightened. Deal’s jaw rose a fraction…
And then he heard the explosion and simultaneously he felt release. Kittle’s hands fell away, his knee slid off Deal’s spine. He heard a soft sighing sound, as if Kittle were stirring in his sleep, and then he felt the man slump atop him. There was another shot, the force of it striking Kittle, then burning into Deal as well.
Deal managed to turn his head aside, saw a very real James Ray Willis standing above him, pistol in hand. “I’m deeply sorry,” Willis said. “My brother was an idiot. You should never have gotten this far.” He shook his head sorrowfully, nudged Kittle’s body aside. “This isn’t personal, you understand. There is something so much larger at stake…”
Deal’s vision was going in and out now, full of glittering pinpoints. Hard to tell if the Willis talking to him was the real Willis or the hologram of Willis.
“Not personal,” Deal repeated. His head was spinning, he could taste blood in his mouth. Janice was a few feet away. She was alive. But this man would kill him, and then he would kill her.
“I’m going to remember that,” Deal said, trying to get his feet under him. “I’ll tell Arch Dolan when I see him. He’ll feel better. And Rosenhaus and Eddie Lightner, too, if they’re in the same place, that is.”
“It’s over with now,” Willis was saying. He took a step back. “There doesn’t have to be any more killing. It should never have happened in the first place. But there wasn’t a choice.”
“And Sara Dolan,” Deal said. “I suppose there wasn’t a choice for her, either?”
Willis shook his head. “She’s alive,” he said, glancing over his shoulder nervously. “…but she’s not important.”
Deal felt it like a blow. “Then what is so goddamned important?” Deal said. He was on his hands and knees again. He saw blood dripping steadily from somewhere onto the stage floor beneath him. He felt a wave of nausea, clenched his gut tight. “Why would you have to kill some poor guy who just wanted to run a bookstore?”
Willis wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Not the hologram, Deal thought. Holograms didn’t sweat, didn’t come unglued. One thing to play God talking long distance to your button man, another thing to look at a person, put him away yourself.
“We’ll be more careful,” Willis said, the words pinwheeling out, now. “The stakes, after all. Time itself, that’s what we’re fighting for. To spread the word, the right word.” His eyes were glittering. “It’s not power. It’s not money. It’s to be used the proper way.” He swept his hand about the auditorium. “I’m not some politician. The world’s gone to greedy hell, I don’t have to tell you that. But what self-centered politician could turn such a complex mess around? But if a person, the right person, could control the way the word got out, then you’d control what got out. A worldwide web, all right: but a web in fact, orchestrated together with books, magazines, newspapers, television, and radio, as it is in fact today, but finally in the proper hands. Not buy time, but control time…”
“You want to go out over the Internet, dance on every desk in the world, is that it? A little homunculus, going to tell us how to behave?”
Deal laughed, despite the pain it caused him. “The worst of it is being killed by a lunatic,” he said. He coughed, felt a gurgle in his chest, knew where the blood was coming from now.
Willis snorted. “Look what the real lunatics did, Mr. Deal. In Germany, in Russia, in China. And what about us? The United States of Make a Killing Quick. You think our leaders are the sane ones?”
Deal felt his vision going black around the edges. He wanted to rise up, take a swing, do something, anything, but there was nothing left. No strength. Only will. He stared up at Willis. “Keep in mind what my old man used to say,” Deal managed. “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
Willis face darkened.
“Pull the trigger, you dickwad. Get it over with.”
Willis raised the pistol. “What must be…” he began sorrowfully, and then there was a deep thudding sound, and he stopped midsentence, his eyes going sightless, his body suddenly rigid, his hands splaying out at his sides as if he’d stepped on a high-tension line. The pistol tumbled to the stage, bouncing near Deal’s cheek.
Willis crumpled, blood spraying from the crown of his perfectly coiffed head, as he fell atop his brother. Deal saw her there, realized what had happened, saw her lift the heavy blade again.
“Janice,” he called, not sure if he were actually speaking the words, not sure if she could hear. “It’s enough, Janice.”
Still sobbing, her face gone wild, she brought the blade down again.
Chapter 26
Miami, Six Weeks Later
The image on the television screen was of James Ray Willis, in all his holographic glory, his arms spread over the flock of his faithful, thousands of them gathered in their temple, faces rapt as their leader spoke of reclaiming their lives from the modern-day forces of Moloch. The scene shifted rapidly then, cutting away to the stoic visage of Ted Koppel behind his desk on the Night-line set.
“And so they still gather at the Church of the Worldwide Light, to pay homage to their fallen leader,” Koppel intoned, “and to a person they will tell you that James Ray Willis was a man maligned by the media and done in by a cabal formulated by an international consortium of bond traders and powermongers.
“As for allegations that Willis himself had engaged in a ruthless plot to engineer his own media empire, they will respond by shaking their heads in dismay.” Here Koppel’s visage dissolved, to be replaced by a montage of images: a bank of satellite dishes and microwave relay towers; a series of foreign-language newspapers and magazines tumbling atop one another; a shot of Martin Rosenhaus, from sunnier days, his foot atop a silver shovel at the groundbreaking of a Mega-Media store; and, of course, the shot that had appeared in nearly every newspaper and current events magazine the world around: it was a view outside the convocation center of the Church of the Worldwide Light, where an armada of police cars and emergency vehicles had converged—in the foreground were John and Janice Deal, faces haggard and blood-streaked, struggling away from the carnage inside with Sara Dolan propped up between them.
Koppel’s image was back then. “All of that merely more proof for the true believer that the international cabal is in full swing, capable of making anything happen…or seem to have.” Koppel smiled his patented smile, as if to acknowledge the absurdity of the notion. After a moment, he bent to shuffle some papers in front of him and turned back to the camera brightly.
“As a footnote, we can report that as of this day, the House of Books in Coral Gables, Florida, where the unfolding of this tragedy began, is once again open for business under the stewardship of new managers Sara Dolan and Janice Deal. We’d like to wish them the best of luck.”
There was a cheer then as the scene cut away to commercial. Deal snapped off the power on the big-screen TV, then turned with his glass held high, toasting the crowd that was still assembled in the book-store’s reading room, despite the late hour. Terrence Terrell, who’d donated the TV in honor of the event, had gone home. But Driscoll was still there, of course, and Sara, and Janice. All of them cheering, along with the crowd. For books, and everything else.
***
“Pretty good champagne, Driscoll,” Deal said a little later. He held his plastic glass up to the light. What was it supposed to be, anyway? Lots of big bubbles? A few little ones? It tasted good, that much he knew.
Driscoll looked around the room, the crowd long gone, shrugged his char
acteristic shrug. “Must have been a mistake,” he said. “The guy that owns the Zaragosa Drive-ins gave it to me, a little bonus on account of I caught the scumwad who was knocking over his stores.”
Deal nodded. “Did you do like you said, hand over the money, wait ’til he drove away to call the cops?”
“That’s what I wanted to do,” Driscoll said. “But when he pointed his gun at me, it pissed me off. I made out like I was scared, dumped a milkshake in his lap. By the time he looked up to complain, he had my boot in his face.”
“Through the drive-in window?” Deal asked.
“Took the frame with me, going out,” Driscoll said.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Deal said.
Driscoll waved it away. “Another bad guy bites the dust. Wasn’t as spectacular as what you two managed.”
Deal glanced over at Janice, who was leaning against the reading room counter, talking with Sara Dolan. “I’d have traded bad guys with you, that’s for sure,” Deal said. “And to think I dismissed Willis as a nutcase…a guy who wants to tell the world how to think claims there’s this big conspiracy to tell us all how to think…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
“Don’t feel so bad,” Driscoll said. “There were plenty of folks who felt the same way when this German house painter had pretty much the same idea. The sad thing is”—he gestured at the darkened TV screen—“there’s still all these people out there ready to believe what Willis wanted to feed ’em. If he’d ever gotten it all in place, if someone ever does, who knows what could happen…” He broke off, giving his Driscoll shrug, the one that acknowledged everything and anything.
Driscoll smiled then, and lifted his glass. “Anyway, here’s to you, Johnny Deal. You did good.” He turned to the others, raised his gravelly voice. “And here’s to books.”
Janice, who’d gone to toss another log into the fireplace, turned to join the toast. It was a balmy March night, and the temperature outside was hovering in the mid-sixties. Still, Deal had thought it only appropriate to build a fire. Arch would have gone for it. Turn the AC down to frigid, stoke the fire. Controlled cold weather. And what better way to mark the grand reopening?
It had all begun with a reading in the big room earlier in the night, a huge, Russian-styled marathon of a program: poets, fiction writers, a couple of playwrights, two dozen or more, all from South Florida, and the audience well into the hundreds, spilling out of the reading room, through art and architecture and philosophy, all the way into the children’s section, where they’d rigged up the intercom so people could listen even if they couldn’t see.
Later in the evening, one of the readers, a performance poet from somewhere in the Caribbean, had led a conga line out the front door of the place, snaking across the street and past the still-shuttered Mega-Media site, the whole crowd chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and tying up traffic for a good twenty minutes. A couple of squad cars had come by to check out the disturbance, but the cops, one of whom resembled the guy who’d nearly ticketed Deal the day he’d left Dr. Goodwin’s office, had gotten in the spirit, used their cars to block off the street, redirect traffic until the line was back inside the House of Books.
“To books,” Janice agreed. She lifted her glass, her eyes meeting Deal’s momentarily. She turned away to the counter, where Sara Dolan leaned back on her elbows, a wistful smile on her face, tear tracks tracing her cheeks. “And to the beginning of a long and successful partnership,” Janice added.
She paused, took a breath. “Despite everything that’s happened, we all know someone’s going to come in and open up that big store across the street.” She gestured out the window behind them. “And I’ve heard it said that little shops like this one are going to become footnotes to history, as doomed as the neighborhood hardware store when Home Depot comes to town.
“But”—and here her chin jutted out, her eyes narrowing—“I say there are some battles that have to be fought. This is different. It seems a lot more important than hammers and nails.”
“Fact is,” Deal said, “when we had all those little hardware stores, there used to be a lot more brands of hammers to choose from.”
Janice shook her head. “Leave it to you, Deal. Somebody to get sentimental over hammers.”
Sara’s smile broadened a bit as she pushed away from the counter, lifted her glass, too. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, banging Deal’s glass hard enough to slosh champagne over both their upraised hands. “And to good friends,” she said.
She paused then, glancing about their surroundings. Burning fireplace, stacks and shelves of books, magazines with strange names and some in foreign print. The familiar smell of paper, and glue, and woodsmoke.
“And here’s to my brother…” she added. “I’m not going to get weepy, I promise. But he would have loved this night.”
“Of course he would have,” Janice said. The two women embraced then, champagne spilling from their glasses as they clutched one another tightly.
Deal looked on, feeling teary himself. He glanced at Driscoll, who harrumphed a strangled cough and turned away.
Deal found himself smiling as his old friend continued his pretense of coughing. Driscoll would rather spend a day in the dentist’s chair than admit his feelings, he mused. But he had them, all right. And he’d step in front of a train to save someone he cared about.
Deal took a sip of his drink, thinking how fortunate he was, how fortunate they all were, really. Terrible things had happened, and yet they’d survived and more. Janice and Sara partners now, he and Janice at least working in that same direction, life might just be slipping everyone a little payback yet…
He broke off then when he realized who was missing. “Els,” he cried, and everyone turned to look at him, their expressions frozen in concern. “What’s happened to Els?”
He led the dash through philosophy, architecture, art, out through hardcover fiction and past the small bestseller rack by the circular stairwell in the main room, where they found Els’s wheelchair tipped over on its side.
Deal cursed under his breath, jumped over the wheelchair, grasped the rails of the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, spiraling his way upward as fast as he could manage, the others thundering behind him.
He found Els in the inner room, the place he had always referred to as his “inner sanctum.” The mess had been erased, the broken table repaired, a new easy chair brought up, the lamp replaced.
The doors of the glass case that housed Els’s most prized volumes were hanging open, two books teetering precariously at the edge of an upper shelf. Els himself was slumped in the easy chair, his eyes closed, the light burning at his shoulder. A copy of Huckleberry Finn lay spineout and open against his chest.
How he’d made it up here by himself, Deal would never know. The man had been making progress the doctors would never have dared hope for, but he still couldn’t speak, and he hadn’t been out of his chair without assistance since they’d brought him home last week.
Sara was at Deal’s shoulder then, her hand flying to her mouth when she saw what Deal was looking at.
“Oh, Els,” she cried.
El’s eyes came open at the words, his expression that of a man who’d been snatched from a dream, or caught in some compromising act.
His hands went to his chest, clutched the copy of Huckleberry Finn. His mouth popped open once or twice, his face contorted in the painful fashion Deal had come to recognize when Els was trying to speak.
“You scared us, Els,” Deal said, moving carefully toward him.
Els held up one hand, kept the other pressed to his chest. “Book,” he said, the sound bursting finally from his lips.
His hand stroked the cover as if a pet lay there. “Good book,” he added.
And there was no one to disagree.
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