A plague of suicide was as irrational a concept as any brewed in the stew-pot minds of those people who thought that the mayor was a robot and that evil aliens were watching them every moment of the day. Joe couldn’t comprehend how Charlie Delmann could have gone from near euphoria to despair in the space of two minutes—as Nora Vadance had gone from a pleasant breakfast and the newspaper comics pages to self-evisceration without even pausing to leave a note of explanation.
If Joe was right about the meaning of the shot, however, there was a slim chance that the doctor was still alive. Maybe he hadn’t done himself in with only one round. Maybe he could still be saved.
The prospect of saving a life, after so many had slipped like water through his hands, pushed Joe forward in spite of his dread. He climbed the rest of the stairs two at a time.
On the second floor, with barely a glance, he passed unlighted rooms and closed doors. At the end of the hallway, from behind a half-open door, came ruddy light.
The master suite was entered through a small foyer of its own. Beyond lay the bedroom, furnished with bone-coloured contemporary upholstery. The graceful pale-green curves of Sung Dynasty pottery, displayed on glass shelves, imposed serenity on the chamber.
Dr. Charles Delmann was sprawled on a Chinese sleigh bed. Across him lay a Mossberg 12-gauge, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun. Because of the short barrel, he had been able to put the muzzle between his teeth and easily reach the trigger. Even in the poor light, Joe could see there was no reason to check for a pulse.
The celadon lamp on the farther of the two nightstands provided the only illumination. The glow was ruddy because the shade was splashed with blood.
On a Saturday night ten months ago, in the course of covering a story, Joe had visited the city morgue, where the bagged bodies on the gurneys and the naked bodies on the autopsy tables waited for the attention of overworked pathologists. Abruptly he was gripped by the irrational conviction that the cadavers surrounding him were those of his wife and children; all of them were Michelle and the girls, as though Joe had wandered into a scene in a science fiction movie about clones. And from within the body-size drawers of the stainless-steel coolers, where more of the dead rested between destinations, arose the muffled voices of Michelle, Chrissie, little Nina, pleading with him to release them to the world of the living. Beside him, a coroner’s assistant zipped open a body bag, and Joe looked down into the winter-white face of a dead woman, her painted mouth like a poinsettia leaf crumpled on snow, and he saw Michelle, Chrissie, Nina. The dead woman’s blind blue eyes were mirrors of his own soaring madness. He had walked out of the morgue and submitted his resignation to Caesar Santos, his editor.
Now, he quickly turned away from the bed before any beloved faces materialized over that of the dead physician.
An eerie wheezing came to his attention, and for an instant he thought that Delmann was straining to draw breath through his shattered face. Then he realized that he was listening to his own ragged breathing.
On the nearer nightstand, the lighted green numbers on a digital clock were flashing. Time changes were occurring at a frantic pace: ten minutes with every flash, the hours reversing through the early evening and backward into the afternoon.
Joe had the crazy thought that the malfunctioning clock—which must have been hit by a stray shotgun pellet—might magically undo all that had happened, that Delmann might rise from death as the pellets rattled backward into the barrel and torn flesh re-knit, that in a moment Joe himself might be on the Santa Monica Beach once more, in the sun, and then back in his one-room apartment in the moon-deep night, on the telephone with Beth in Virginia, and backward, still backward, until Flight 353 had not yet gone down in Colorado.
From downstairs came a scream, imploding his desperate fantasy. Then another scream.
He thought it was Lisa. As tough as she was, she had probably never before screamed in her life, yet this was a cry of sheerest childlike terror.