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—”
“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—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—”
“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—
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—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—he’s been called much worse by your ordinary Saturday night drunks—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.
10
AS THE CRUISER with Tom Lund behind the wheel noses down Third Street to Chase—roof-rack lights decorously dark, siren off—Dale takes out his wallet and begins digging through the mess in the back: business cards people have given him, a few dog-eared photographs, little licks of folded-over notebook paper. On one of the latter he finds what he wants.
“Whatcha doin’, boss?” Tom asks.
“None of your beeswax. Just drive the car.”
Dale grabs the phone from its spot on the console, grimaces and wipes off the residue of someone’s powdered doughnut, then, without much hope, dials the number of Jack Sawyer’s cell phone. He starts to smile when the phone is answered on the fourth ring, but the smile metamorphoses into a frown of puzzlement. He knows that voice and should recognize it, but—
“Hello?” says the person who has apparently answered Jack’s cell phone. “Speak now, whoever you are, or forever hold your peace.”
Then Dale knows. Would have known immediately if he had been at home or in his office, but in this context—
“Henry?” he says, knowing he sounds stupid but not able to help it. “Uncle Henry, is that you?”
Jack is piloting his truck across the Tamarack Bridge when the cell phone in his pants pocket starts its annoying little tweet. He takes it out and taps the back of Henry’s hand with it. “Deal with this,” he says. “Cell phones give you brain cancer.”
“Which is okay for me but not for you.”
“More or less, yeah.”
“That’s what I love about you, Jack,” Henry says, and opens the phone with a nonchalant flick of the wrist. “Hello?” And, after a pause: “Speak now, whoever you are, or forever hold your peace.” Jack glances at him, then back at the road. They’re coming up on Roy’s Store, where the early shopper gets the best greens. “Yes, Dale. It is indeed your esteemed—” Henry listens, frowning a little bit and smiling a little bit. “I’m in Jack’s truck, with Jack,” he says. “George Rathbun isn’t working this morning because KDCU is covering the Summer Marathon over in La Riv—”