Johnny turned around. Bannerman had taken off his glasses and was wiping his eyes again.
‘If you really can see such things, I pity you. You’re a freak of God, no different from a two-headed cow I once saw in the carnival. I’m sorry. That’s a shit thing to say, I know.’
‘The Bible says God loves all his creatures,’ Johnny said. His voice was a bit unsteady.
‘Yeah?’ Bannerman nodded and rubbed the red places on the sides of his nose where his glasses sat. ‘Got a funny way of showing it, doesn’t he?’
12.
About twenty minutes later the telephone rang and Bannerman answered it smartly.
Talked briefly. Listened.
Johnny watched his face get old. He hung up and looked at Johnny for a long time without speaking.
‘November 12, 1972,’ he said. ‘A college girl. They found her in a field out by the turnpike. Ann Simons, her name was. Raped and strangled. Twenty-three years old. No semen type obtained. It’s still not proof, Johnny.’
‘I don’t think, in your own mind, you need any more proof,’ Johnny said. ‘And if you confront him with what you have, I think he’ll break down.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
Johnny remembered the vision on the handstand. It whirled back at him like a crazy, lethal boomerang. The tearing sensation. The pain that was pleasant, the pain that recalled the pain of the clothespin, the pain that reconfirmed everything.
‘Get him to drop his pants,’ Johnny said. Bannerman looked at him.
13.
The reporters were still out in the lobby. In truth, they probably wouldn’t have moved even had they not suspected a break in the case – or at least a bizarre new development.
The roads out of town were impassable.
Bannerman and Johnny went out the supply closet window.
‘Are you sure this is the way to do it?’ Johnny asked, and the storm tried to rip the words out of his mouth. His legs hurt.
‘No,’ Bannerman said simply, ‘but I think you should be in on it. Maybe I think he should have the chance to look you in the face, Johnny. Come on. The Dodds are only two blocks from here.’
They set off, hooded and booted, a pair of shadows in the driving snow. Beneath his coat Bannerman was wearing his service pistol. His handcuffs were clipped to his belt. Before they had gone a block through the deep snow Johnny was limping badly, but he kept his mouth grimly shut about it.
But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.
‘Son, what’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing,’ Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.
‘It sure is something. You act like you’re walking on two broken legs.’
‘They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied.
Started to melt is how Dr. Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics…
‘Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?’
Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital hills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.
‘Yes, something like that. When I’m on them too long, they stiffen up. That’s all.’
‘You want to go back?’
You bet I do. Go back and not have’ to think about this hellacious business anymore’.
Wish I’d never come. Not my problem. This is the guy who compared me to a two-headed cow.
‘No, I’m okay,’ he said.
They stepped out of the doorway and the wind grabbed them and tried to bowl them along the empty street. They struggled through the harsh, snow-choked glare of arc-sodium streetlights, bent into the wind. They turned onto a side street and five houses down Bannerman stopped in front of a small and neat New England salt-box. Like the other houses on the street, it was dark and battened down.
‘This is the house,’ Bannerman said, his voice oddly colorless. They worked their way through the snowdrift that the wind had thrown against the porch and mounted the steps.
14.
Mrs. Henrietta Dodd was a big woman who was carrying a dead weight of flesh on her frame. Johnny had never seen a woman who looked any sicker. Her skin was a yellowish-gray. Her hands were nearly reptilian with an eczemalike rash. And there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother’s eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.