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, surrounded 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—or the thing—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—the Fisherman—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—you don’t invite a John Q. to a crime scene, especially not a murder scene—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—
“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—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 tougher 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 low, sleek Pontiac with JUST SAY NO emblazoned on the doors—is way cool. Basically, Officer Hrabowski is about as exciting as a tuna on white, hold the mayo.