of her she’s been cryin’, which upsets me mightily. Now, though I’m not
an angry man by nature, or a trouble-makin’ man, I don’t know quite what
I might do if you keep treatin’ me high-handed and try to stop me from
seein’ what my girl’s cryin’ about.”
Sharp’s face tightened with anger. He stepped back far enough to give
himself room to plant one big hand on The Stone’s chest.
Peake was not sure whether Sharp intended to guide the man out of the
room and into the corridor or give him one hell of a shove back against
the wall. He never found out which it was because The Stone put his own
hand on Sharp’s wrist and bore down and, without seeming to make any
effort whatsoever, he removed Sharp’s hand from his chest. In fact, he
must have put as much painful pressure on Sharp’s wrist as Sharp had
applied to Sarah’s fingers, for the deputy director went pale, the
redness of anger draining right out of him, and a queer look passed
through his eyes.
Letting go of Sharp’s hand, The Stone said, “1 know you’re a federal
agent, and I have the greatest respect for the law. I know you can see
this as obstruction, which would give you a good excuse to knock me on
my can and clap me in handcuffs. But I’m of the opinion that it
wouldn’t do you or your agency the least bit of good if you roughed me
up, specially since I’ve told you I’ll encourage my daughter to
cooperate. What do you think?”
Peake wanted to applaud. He didn’t.
Sharp stood there, breathing heavily, trembling, and gradually his
rage-clouded eyes cleared, and he shook himself the way a bull sometimes
will shake itself back to its senses after unsuccessfully charging a
matador’s cape. “Okay. I just want to get my information fast. I
don’t care how. Maybe you’ll get it faster than I can.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sharp. Give me half an hour-” “Five minutes!” Sharp
said.
“Well, sir,” The Stone said quietly, “you’ve got to give me time to say
hello to my daughter, time to hug her. I haven’t seen her in almost
eighteen months. And I need time to get the whole story from her, to
find out what sort of trouble she’s in. That’s got to come first, fore
I start throwin’ questions at her.”
“Half an hour’s too damn long,” Sharp said. “We’re in pursuit of a man,
a dangerous man, and we-” “If I was to call an attorney to advise my
daughter, which is her right as a citizen, it’d take him hours to get
here-” “Half an hour,” Sharp told The Stone, “and not one damn minute
more. I’ll be in the hall.”
Previously, Peake had discovered that the deputy director was a sadist
and a pedophile, which was an important thing to know. Now he had made
another discovery about Sharp, The son of a bitch was, at heart, a
coward, he might shoot you in the back or sneak up on you and slit your
throat, yes, those things seemed within his character, but in a
face-to-face confrontation, he would chicken out if the stakes got high
enough. And that was an even more important thing to know.
Peake stood for a moment, unable to move, as Sharp went to the door.
He could not take his eyes off The Stone.
“Peake!” Sharp said as he pulled the door open.
Finally Peake followed, but he kept glancing back at Felsen Kiel, The
Stone. Now there, by God, was a legend.
Detective Reese Hagerstrom went to bed at four o’clock Tuesday morning,
after returning from Mrs. Leben’s house in Placentia, and he woke at
ten-thirty, unrested because the night had been full of terrible dreams.
Glassy-eyed dead bodies in trash dumpsters.
Dead women nailed to walls. Many of the nightmares had involved Janet,
the wife Reese had lost. In the dreams, she was always clutching the
door of the blue Chevy van, the infamous van, and crying, “They’ve got
Esther, they’ve got Esther!” In every dream, one of the guys in the van
shot her exactly as he had shot her in real life, point-blank, and the