“Buddy?”
She startled him. “What?”
“Do you want to go upstairs and see Sam?”
Picking up his magazines, he said, “No. No. I’ll tell him some time. Some other time. Not now.” He started toward the door.
“Buddy?”
He glanced back.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“No.” He forced a laugh. “No. Nothing. World’s treating me okay.” He hurried out of the store.
On the other side of Main Street, back in his two-room apartment, he went to the bathroom and peed, opened a bottle of Coca-Cola, and sat down at the kitchen table to look at his magazines. First thing, he paged through both of them, search. ing for articles about cats and pictures of cats and advertisements for cat food. He found two pages in each magazine that offended him, and he tore them out at once, regardless of what was on the backs of them. Methodically, he ripped each page. into hundreds of tiny pieces and threw the resultant heap of confetti into the wastebasket. Only then was he prepared to relax and look at the pictures.
Halfway through the first magazine, he came across an article about a team of skin divers who were, it seemed to him, trying to uncover an ancient treasure ship. He couldn’t read more than two words out of five, but he studied the pictures with great interest-and suddenly was reminded of what he had seen in the woods that night. Near the mill. When he was taking a pee. At a quarter of five in the morning, on the day he’d so carefully marked on his calendar. Skin divers. Coming down from the reservoir. Carrying flashlights. And guns. It was such a silly thing, he couldn’t forget it. Such a funny. . . such a scary thing. They didn’t belong where he had seen them. They hadn’t been hunting for treasure, not at night, not up in the reservoir.
What had they been doing?
He’d thought about that for ever so long, but he simply couldn’t figure it out. He wanted to ask someone to explain it, but he knew they’d laugh at him.
Last week, however, he realized that there was someone in Black River who would listen to him, who would believe him and wouldn’t laugh no matter how silly the story was. Sam. Sam always had time for him, even before his mother died. Sam never made fun of him or talked down to him or hurt his feelings. Furthermore, so far as Buddy was concerned, Sam Edison was easily the smartest person in town. He knew just about everything; or Buddy thought he did. If there was anyone who could explain to him what he had seen, it was Sam.
On the other hand, he didn’t want to look like a fool in Sam’s eyes. He was determined to give himself every chance to work out the answer first. That was why he had delayed going to Sam since he had remembered him last Wednesday.
A while ago in the store, he finally was ready to let Sam take over his thinking for him. But Sam was upstairs, in rooms that were unfamiliar to Buddy, and that raised the question of cats.
Now he had more time to puzzle it out on his own. If Sam was in the store the next time Buddy went there, he would tell him the story. But not for a few days yet. He sat in the patterned late-afternoon sunlight that came through the curtain, drank Coca-Cola, and wondered.
8
Eight Months Earlier:
Saturday, December 18, 1976
IN THE COMPUTER CENTER of the sealed wing of the Greenwich house, seven days before Christmas, the monitor boards and systems bulbs and cathode-ray tubes and glowing scopes, although they were mostly red and green, had not reminded Salsbury of the holiday.
When he entered the room, his first time there in months, Klinger looked around at the lights and said, “Very Christmasy.”
Strangely enough, it was rather Christmasy.
However, because he hadn’t perceived something which had registered with the general in mere seconds, Salsbury felt uneasy. For almost two years now, day and night, he had been telling himself that he must be quicker, sharper, more cunning, and more forward-thinking than either of his partners-if he was to keep his partners from eventually putting a bullet in his head and burying him at the southern end of the estate beside Brian Kingman. Which was surely what they had in mind for him. And for each other. Either that or slavery through the keylock program. Therefore, it was quite disturbing to him that Klinger-hairy, flat-faced gorilla that he was-should make, of all things, an aesthetic observation before Salsbury himself had made it.