He raises a hand without turning and calls back, "Right!"
Five minutes later, he's walking up his own driveway again. At least temporarily, the fear and depression have been burned out of him. The ecstasy as well, which is a relief. The last thing a coppiceman needs is to go charging through an investigation in a state of ecstasy.
As he sights the box on the porch ¡ª and the wrapping paper, and the feathers, and the ever-popular child's sneaker, can't forget that ¡ª Jack's mind turns back to Mrs. Morton quoting that great sage Henry Leyden.
I can't help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there's such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total joy.
Total joy. Jack has felt this from time to time as a detective, sometimes while investigating a crime scene, more often while questioning a witness who knows more than he or she is telling . . . and this is something Jack Sawyer almost always knows, something he smells. He supposes carpenters feel that joy when they are carpentering particularly well, sculptors when they're having a good nose or chin day, architects when the lines are landing on their blueprints just right. The only problem is, someone in French Landing (maybe one of the surrounding towns, but Jack is guessing French Landing) gets that feeling of joy by killing children and eating parts of their little bodies.
Someone in French Landing is, more and more frequently, waking up as the Fisherman.
Jack goes into his house by the back door. He stops in the kitchen for the box of large-size Baggies, a couple of wastebasket liners, a dustpan, and the whisk broom. He opens the refrigerator's icemaker compartment and loads about half the cubes into one of the plastic liners ¡ª as far as Jack Sawyer is concerned, Irma Freneau's poor foot has reached its maximum state of decay.
He ducks into his study, where he grabs a yellow legal pad, a black marker, and a ballpoint pen. In the living room he gets the shorter set of fire tongs. And by the time he steps back onto the porch, he has pretty much put his secret identity as Jack Sawyer aside.
I am COPPICEMAN, he thinks, smiling. Defender of the American Way, friend of the lame, the halt, and the dead.
Then, as he looks down at the sneaker, s
urrounded by its pitiful little cloud of stink, the smile fades. He feels some of the tremendous mystery we felt when we first came upon Irma in the wreckage of the abandoned restaurant. He will do his absolute best to honor this remnant, just as we did our best to honor the child. He thinks of autopsies he has attended, of the true solemnity that lurks behind the jokes and butcher-shop crudities.
"Irma, is it you?" he asks quietly. "If it is, you help me, now. Talk to me. This is the time for the dead to help the living. " Without thinking about it, Jack kisses his fingers and blows the kiss down toward the sneaker. He thinks, I'd like to kill the man ¡ª or the thing ¡ª that did this. String him up alive and screaming while he filled his pants. Send him out in the stink of his own dirt.
But such thoughts are not honorable, and he banishes them.
The first Baggie is for the sneaker with the remains of the foot inside it. Use the tongs. Zip it closed. Mark the date on the Baggie with the marker. Note the nature of the evidence on the pad with the ballpoint. Put it in the wastebasket liner with the ice in it.
The second is for the cap. No need for the tongs here; he's already handled the item. He puts it in the Baggie. Zips it closed. Marks the date, notes the nature of the evidence on the pad.
The third bag is for the brown wrapping paper. He holds it up for a moment in the tongs, examining the bogus bird stamps. MANUFACTURED BY DOMINO is printed below each picture, but that's all. No restaurant name, nothing of that sort. Into the Baggie. Zip it closed. Mark the date. Note the nature of the evidence.
He sweeps up the feathers and puts them in a fourth Baggie. There are more feathers in the box. He picks the box up with the tongs, dumps the feathers inside onto the dustpan, and then his heart takes a sudden hard leap in his chest, seeming to knock against the left side of his rib cage like a fist. Something is written on the box's bottom. The same Sharpie marker has been used to make the same straggling letters. And whoever wrote this knew who he was writing to. Not the outer Jack Sawyer, or else he ¡ª the Fisherman ¡ª would have no doubt called him Hollywood.
This message is addressed to the inner man, and to the child who was here before Jack "Hollywood" Sawyer was ever thought of.
Try Ed's Eats and Dogs, coppiceman. Your fiend,
THE FISHERMAN.
"Your fiend," Jack murmurs. "Yes. " He picks up the box with the tongs and puts it into the second wastebasket liner; he doesn't have any Baggies quite big enough for it. Then he gathers all the evidence beside him in a neat little pile. This stuff always looks the same, at once grisly and prosaic, like the kind of photographs you used to see in those true-crime magazines.
He goes inside and dials Henry's number. He's afraid he'll get Mrs. Morton, but it turns out to be Henry instead, thank God. His current fit of Rat-ism has apparently passed, although there's a residue; even over the phone Jack can hear the faint thump and bray of "electrical guitars. "
He knows Ed's Eats well, Henry says, but why in the world would Jack want to know about a place like that? "It's nothing but a wreck now; Ed Gilbertson died quite a time ago and there are people in French Landing who'd call that a blessing, Jack. The place was a ptomaine palace if ever there was one. A gut-ache waiting to happen. You'd have expected the board of health to shut him down, but Ed knew people. Dale Gilbertson, for one. "
"The two of them related?" Jack asks, and when Henry replies "Fuck, yeah," something his friend would never say in the ordinary course of things, Jack understands that while Henry may have avoided a migraine this time, that Rat is still running in his head. Jack has heard similar bits of George Rathbun pop out from time to time, unexpected fat exultations from Henry's slim throat, and there is the way Henry often says good-bye, throwing a Ding-dong or Ivey-divey over his shoulder: that's just the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook coming up for air.
"Where exactly is it?" Jack asks.
"That's hard to say," Henry replies. He now sounds a bit testy. "Out by the farm equipment place . . . Goltz's? As I recall, the driveway's so long you might as well call it an access road. And if there was ever a sign, it's long gone. When Ed Gilbertson sold his last microbe-infested chili dog, Jack, you were probably in the first grade. What's all this about?"
Jack knows that what he's thinking of doing is ridiculous by normal investigatory standards ¡ª you don't invite a John Q. to a crime scene, especially not a murder scene ¡ª but this is no normal investigation. He has one piece of bagged evidence that he recovered in another world, how's that for abnormal? Of course he can find the long-defunct Ed's Eats; someone at Goltz's will no doubt point him right at it. But ¡ª
"The Fisherman just sent me one of Irma Freneau's sneakers," Jack says. "With Irma's foot still inside it. "
Henry's initial response is a deep, sharp intake of breath.
"Henry? Are you all right?"
"Yes. " Henry's voice is shocked but steady. "How terrible for the girl and her mother. " He pauses. "And for you. For Dale. " Another pause. "For this town. "
"Yes. "
"Jack, do you want me to take you to Ed's?"
Henry can do that, Jack knows. Easy as pie. Ivey-divey. And let's get real ¡ª why did he call Henry in the first place?
"Yes," he says.
"Have you called the police?"
"No. "
He'll ask me why not, and what will I say? That I don't want Bobby Dulac, Tom Lund, and the rest of them tromping around out there, mixing their scents with the doer's scent, until I get a chance to smell for myself? That I don't trust a mother's son of them not to fuck things up, and that includes Dale himself?
But Henry doesn't ask. "I'll be standing at the end of my driveway," he said. "Just tell me when. "
Jack calculates his remaining chores with the evidence, chores that will end with stowing everything in the lockbox in the bed of his truck. Reminds himself to take his cell phone, which usually does nothing but stand on its little charging device in his study. He'll want to call everything in as soon as he has seen Irma's remains in situ and finished that vital first walk-through. Let Dale and his boys come then. Let them bring along the high school marching band, if they want to. He glances at his watch and sees that it's almost eight o'clock. How did it get so late so early? Distances are shorter in the other place, this he remembers, but does time go faster as well? Or has he simply lost track?
"I'll be there at eight-fifteen," Jack says. "And when we get to Ed's Eats, you're going to sit in my truck like a good little boy until I tell you you can get out. "
"Understood, mon capitaine. "
"Ding-dong. " Jack hangs up and heads back out to the porch.
Things aren't going to turn out the way Jack hopes. He's not going to get that clear first look and smell. In fact, by this afternoon the situation in French Landing, volatile already, will be on the verge of spinning out of control. Although there are many factors at work here, the chief cause of this latest escalation will be the Mad Hungarian.
There's a dose of good old small-town humor in this nickname, like calling the skinny bank clerk Big Joe or the trifocal-wearing bookstore proprietor Hawkeye. Arnold Hrabowski, at five foot six and one hundred and fifty pounds, is the smallest man on Dale Gilbertson's current roster. In fact, he's the smallest person on Dale's current roster, as both Debbi Anderson and Pam Stevens outweigh him and stand taller (at six-one, Debbi could eat scrambled eggs off Arnold Hrabowski's head). The Mad Hungarian is also a fairly inoffensive fellow, the sort of guy who continues to apologize for giving tickets no matter how many times Dale has told him that this is a very bad policy, and who has been known to start interrogations with such unfortunate phrases as Excuse me, but I was wondering. As a result, Dale keeps him on desk as much as possible, or downtown, where everyone knows him and most treat him with absent respect. He tours the county grammar schools as Officer Friendly. The little ones, unaware that they are getting their first lessons on the evils of pot from the Mad Hungarian, adore him. When he gives t
ougher lectures on dope, drink, and reckless driving at the high school, the kids doze or pass notes, although they do think the federally funded DARE car he drives ¡ª a low, sleek Pontiac with JUST SAY NO emblazoned on the doors ¡ª is way cool. Basically, Officer Hrabowski is about as exciting as a tuna on white, hold the mayo.
But in the seventies, you see, there was this relief pitcher for St. Louis and then the Kansas City Royals, a very fearsome fellow indeed, and his name was Al Hrabosky. He stalked rather than walked in from the bullpen, and before beginning to pitch (usually in the ninth inning with the bases juiced and the game on the line), Al Hrabosky would turn from the plate, lower his head, clench his fists, and pump them once, very hard, psyching himself up. Then he would turn and begin throwing nasty fastballs, many of them within kissing distance of the batters' chins. He was of course called the Mad Hungarian, and even a blind man could see he was the best damn reliever in the majors. And of course Arnold Hrabowski is now known, must be known, as the Mad Hungarian. He even tried to grow a Fu Manchu mustache a few years back, like the one the famed reliever wore. But whereas Al Hrabosky's Fu was as fearsome as Zulu warpaint, Arnold's only provoked chuckles ¡ª a Fu sprouting on that mild accountant's face, just imagine! ¡ª and so he shaved it off.
The Mad Hungarian of French Landing is not a bad fellow; he does his absolute level best, and under normal circumstances his level best is good enough. But these aren't ordinary days in French Landing, these are the slippery slippage days, the abbalah-opopanax days, and he is exactly the sort of officer of whom Jack is afraid. And this morning he is, quite without meaning to, going to make a bad situation very much worse.
The call from the Fisherman comes in to the 911 phone at 8:10 A. M. , while Jack is finishing his notes on the yellow legal pad and Henry is strolling down his driveway, smelling the summer morning with great pleasure in spite of the shadow Jack's news has cast over his mind. Unlike some of the officers (Bobby Dulac, for instance), the Mad Hungarian reads the script taped next to the 911 phone word for word.
ARNOLD HRABOWSKI: Hello, this is the French Landing Police Department, Officer Hrabowski speaking. You've dialed 911. Do you have an emergency?
[Unintelligible sound . . . throat-clearing?]
AH: Hello? This is Officer Hrabowski answering on 911. Do you ¡ª
CALLER: Hello, asswipe.
AH: Who is this? Do you have an emergency?
C: You have an emergency. Not me. You.
AH: Who is this, please?
C: Your worst nightmare.
AH: Sir, could I ask you to identify yourself ?
C: Abbalah. Abbalah-doon. [Phonetic. ]
AH: Sir, I don't ¡ª
C: I'm the Fisherman.
[Silence. ]
C: What's wrong? Scared? You ought to be scared.
AH: Sir. Ah, sir. There are penalties for false ¡ª
C: There are whips in hell and chains in shayol. [Caller may be saying "Sheol. "]
AH: Sir, if I could have your name ¡ª
C: My name is legion. My number is many. I am a rat under the floor of the universe. Robert Frost said that. [Caller laughs. ]
AH: Sir, if you hold, I can put on my chief ¡ª
C: Shut up and listen, asswipe. Your tape running? I hope so. I could shag [Caller may be saying "scram" but word is indistinct] it if I wanted to but I don't want to.
AH: Sir, I ¡ª
C: Kiss my scrote, you monkey. I left you one and I'm tired of waiting for you to find her. Try Ed's Eats and Dogs. Might be a little rotten now, but when she was new she was very [Caller rolls r's, turning the word into "verrry"] tasty.
AH: Where are you? Who is this? If this is a joke ¡ª
C: Tell the coppiceman I said hello.
When the call began, the Mad Hungarian's pulse was lub-dubbing along at a perfectly normal sixty-eight beats a minute. When it ends at 8:12, Arnold Hrabowski's ticker is in overdrive. His face is pale. Halfway through the call he looked at the Caller I. D. readout and wrote down the number displayed there with a hand shaking so badly that the numbers jigged up and down over three lines on his pad. When the Fisherman hangs up and he hears the sound of an open line, Hrabowski is so flustered that he tries to dial the callback on the red phone, forgetting that 911 is a one-way street. His fingers strike the smooth plastic front of the phone and he drops it back into the cradle with a frightened curse. He looks at it like something that has bitten him.
Hrabowski grabs the receiver from the black telephone beside 911, starts to punch in the callback, but his fingers betray him and hit two numbers at once. He curses again, and Tom Lund, passing by with a cup of coffee, says, "What's wrong there, Arnie?"
"Get Dale!" the Mad Hungarian shouts, startling Tom so badly he spills coffee on his fingers. "Get him out here now!"
"What the hell's wrong with y ¡ª "
"NOW,goddamnit!"
Tom stares at Hrabowski a moment longer, eyebrows raised, then goes to tell Dale that the Mad Hungarian seems to have really gone mad.
The second time Hrabowski tries, he succeeds in dialing the callback number. It rings. It rings. And it rings some more.
Dale Gilbertson appears with his own cup of coffee. There are dark circles under his eyes, and the lines at the corners of his mouth are a lot more prominent than they used to be.
"Arnie? What's ¡ª "
"Play back the last call," Arnold Hrabowski says. "I think it was . . . hello!" He barks this last, sitting forward behind the dispatch desk and shoving papers every which way. "Hello, who is this?"
Listens.
"It's the police, that's who it is. Officer Hrabowski, FLPD. Now you talk to me. Who is this?"
Dale, meanwhile, has got the earphones on his head and is listening to the most recent call to French Landing 911 with mounting horror. Oh dear God, he thinks. His first impulse ¡ª the very first ¡ª is to call Jack Sawyer and ask for help. To bawl for it, like a little kid with his hand caught in a door. Then he tells himself to take hold, that this is his job, like it or not, and he had better take hold and try to do it. Besides, Jack has gone up to Arden with Fred Marshall to see Fred's crazy wife. At least that was the plan.
Cops, meanwhile, are clustering around the dispatch desk: Lund, Tcheda, Stevens. What Dale sees when he looks at them is nothing but big eyes and pale, bewildered faces. And the ones on patrol? The ones currently off duty? No better. With the possible exception of Bobby Dulac, no better. He feels despair as well as horror. Oh, this is a nightmare. A truck with no brakes rolling downhill toward a crowded school playground.
He pulls the earphones off, tearing a small cut by his ear, not feeling it. "Where'd it come from?" he asks Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has hung up the telephone and is just sitting there, stunned. Dale grabs his shoulder and gives it a shake. "Where'd it come from?"
"The 7-Eleven," the Mad Hungarian replies, and Dale hears Danny Tcheda grunt. Not too far from where the Marshall boy's bike disappeared, in other words. "I just spoke with Mr. Rajan Patel, the day clerk. He says the callback number belongs to the pay phone, just outside. "
"Did he see who made the call?"
"No. He was out back, taking a beer delivery. "
"You positive Patel himself didn't ¡ª "
"Yeah. He's got an Indian accent. Heavy. The guy on 911 . . . Dale, you heard him. He sounded like anybody. "
"What's going on?" Pam Stevens asks. She has a good idea, though; they all do. It's just a question of details. "What's happened?"
Because it's the quickest way to get them up to speed, Dale replays the call, this time on speaker.
In the stunned silence that follows, Dale says: "I'm going out to Ed's Eats. Tom, you're coming with me. "
"Yessir!" Tom Lund says. He looks almost ill with excitement.
"Four more cruisers to follow me. " Most of Dale's mind is frozen; this procedural stuff skates giddily on top of the ice. I'm okay at procedure and or
ganization, he thinks. It's just catching the goddamn psycho murderer that's giving me a little trouble. "All pairs. Danny, you and Pam in the first. Leave five minutes after Tom and I do. Five minutes by the clock, and no lights or siren. We're going to keep this quiet just as long as we can. "
Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens look at each other, nod, then look back at Dale. Dale is looking at Arnold "the Mad Hungarian" Hrabowski. He ticks off three more pairs, ending with Dit Jesperson and Bobby Dulac. Bobby is the only one he really wants out there; the others are just insurance and ¡ª God grant it not be necessary ¡ª crowd control. All of them are to come at five-minute intervals.
"Let me go out, too," Arnie Hrabowski pleads. "Come on, boss, what do you say?"
Dale opens his mouth to say he wants Arnie right where he is, but then he sees the hopeful look in those watery brown eyes. Even in his own deep distress, Dale can't help responding to that, at least a little. For Arnie, police life is too often standing on the sidewalk while the parade goes by.
Some parade, he thinks.
"I tell you what, Arn," he says. "When you finish all your other calls, buzz Debbi. If you can get her in here, you can come out to Ed's. "
Arnold nods excitedly, and Dale almost smiles. The Mad Hungarian will have Debbi in here by nine-thirty, he guesses, even if he has to drag her by the hair like Alley Oop. "Who do I pair with, Dale?"
"Come by yourself," Dale says. "In the DARE car, why don't you? But, Arnie, if you leave this desk without relief waiting to drop into the chair the second you leave it, you'll be looking for a new job come tomorrow. "
"Oh, don't worry," Hrabowski says, and, Hungarian or not, in his excitement he sounds positively Suh-vee-dish. Nor is that surprising, since Centralia, where he grew up, was once known as Swede Town.
"Come on, Tom," Dale says. "We'll grab the evidence kit on our ¡ª "
"Uh . . . boss?"
"What, Arnie?" Meaning, of course, What now?
"Should I call those State Police guys, Brown and Black?"
Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens snicker. Tom smiles. Dale doesn't do either. His heart, already in the cellar, now goes even lower. Subbasement, ladies and gentlemen ¡ª false hopes on your left, lost causes on your right. Last stop, everybody out.
Perry Brown and Jeff Black. He had forgotten them, how funny. Brown and Black, who would now almost certainly take his case away from him.
"They're still out at the Paradise Motel," the Mad Hungarian goes on, "although I think the FBI guy went back to Milwaukee. "
"I ¡ª "
"And County," the Hungarian plows relentlessly along. "Don't forget them. You want me to call the M. E. first, or the evidence wagon?" The evidence wagon is a blue Ford Econoline van, packed with everything from quick-drying plaster for taking tire impressions to a rolling video studio. Stuff the French Landing P. D. will never have access to.
Dale stands where he is, head lowered, looking dismally at the floor. They are going to take the case away from him. With every word Hrabowski says, that is clearer. And suddenly he wants it for his own. In spite of how he hates it and how it scares him, he wants it with all his heart. The Fisherman is a monster, but he's not a county monster, a state monster, or a Federal Bureau of Investigation monster. The Fisherman is a French Landing monster, Dale Gilbertson's monster, and he wants to keep the case for reasons that have nothing to do with personal prestige or even the practical matter of holding on to his job. He wants him because the Fisherman is an offense against everything Dale wants and needs and believes in. Those are things you can't say out loud without sounding corny and stupid, but they are true for all that. He feels a sudden, foolish anger at Jack. If Jack had come on board sooner, maybe ¡ª
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. He has to notify County, if only to get the medical examiner out at the scene, and he has to notify the State Police, in the persons of Detectives Brown and Black, as well. But not until he has a look at what's out there, in the field beyond Goltz's. At what the Fisherman has left. By God, not until then.
And, perhaps, has one final swing at the bastard.
"Get our guys rolling at five-minute intervals," he said, "just as I told you. Then get Debbi in the dispatch chair. Have her call State and County. " Arnold Hrabowski's puzzled face makes Dale feels like screaming, but somehow he retains his patience. "I want some lead time. "
"Oh," Arnie says, and then, when he actually does get it: "Oh!"
"And don't tell anyone other than our guys about the call or our response. Anyone. You'd likely start a panic. Do you understand?"
"Absolutely, boss," says the Hungarian.
Dale glances at the clock: 8:26 A. M. "Come on, Tom," he says. "Let's get moving. Tempus fugit. "
The Mad Hungarian has never been more efficient, and things fall into place like a dream. Even Debbi Anderson is a good sport about the desk. And yet through it all, the voice on the phone stays with him. Hoarse, raspy, with just a tinge of accent ¡ª the kind anyone living in this part of the world might pick up. Nothing unusual about that. Yet it haunts him. Not that the guy called him an asswipe ¡ª he's been called much worse by your ordinary Saturday night drunks ¡ª but some of the other stuff. There are whips in hell and chains in shayol. My name is legion. Stuff like that. And abbalah. What was an abbalah? Arnold Hrabowski doesn't know. He only knows that the very sound of it in his head makes him feel bad and scared. It's like a word in a secret book, the kind you might use to conjure up a demon.
When he gets the willies, there's only one person who can take them away, and that's his wife. He knows Dale told him not to tell anybody about what was going down, and he understands the reasons, but surely the chief didn't mean Paula. They have been married twenty years, and Paula isn't like another person at all. She's like the rest of him.
So (more in order to dispel his bad case of the willies than to gossip; let's at least give Arnold that much) the Mad Hungarian makes the terrible mistake of trusting his wife's discretion. He calls Paula and tells her that he spoke to the Fisherman not half an hour ago. Yes, really, the Fisherman! He tells her about the body that is supposedly waiting for Dale and Tom Lund out at Ed's Eats. She asks him if he's all right. Her voice is trembling with awe and excitement, and the Mad Hungarian finds this quite satisfying, since he's feeling awed and excited himself. They talk a little more, and when Arnold hangs up, he feels better. The terror of that rough, strangely knowing voice on the phone has receded a little.
Paula Hrabowski is discretion itself, the very soul of discretion. She tells only her two best friends about the call Arnie got from the Fisherman and the body at Ed's Eats, and swears them both to secrecy. Both say they will never tell a soul, and this is why, one hour later, even before the State Police and the county medical and forensics guys have been called, everyone knows that the police have found a slaughterhouse out at Ed's Eats. Half a dozen murdered kids.
Maybe more.