“What are you, one of those type-A guys?” she asked.
“Not usually. I just didn’t like that thing bangin in the breeze.” He paused, one foot on the running board, looking up at her, thinking. Then he shrugged. “It was like looking at a shutter on a haunted house.
“Okay,” she said, and then more howls rose in the distance—maybe south of them, maybe east, with the wind it was hard to tell, but this time it sounded like at least half a dozen voices. This time it sounded like a pack. Steve got up in the cab and slammed the door.
“Come on,” he said, pulling the transmission lever down into Drive again. “Let’s turn this rig around and find us some law.”
David Carver saw it while the woman in the blue shirt and faded jeans was finally giving up, huddling back against the bars of the drunk-tank and holding her fore arms protectively against her breasts as the
cop pulled the desk away so he could get at her.
Don ‘t touch it, the white-haired man had said when the woman threw the shotgun down and it came clattering across the hardwood floor to bang off the bars of David s cell.
Don’t touch it, it’s empty, just leave it alone!
He had done what the man said, but he had seen some- thing else on the floor when he looked down at the shotgun: one of the shells that had fallen off the desk. It was lying on its side against the far lefthand vertical bar of his cell. Fat green shotgun shell, maybe one of a dozen that had gone rolling every whichway when the crazy cop had started battering the woman, Mary, with the desk and the chair in order to make her drop the gun.
The old guy was right, it would make no sense to go grabbing for the shotgun. Even if he could also get the shell, it would make no sense to do that. The cop was big—tall as a pro basketball player, broad as a pro foot ball player—and the cop was also fast. He’d be on David who had never held a real gun in his life, before David could even figure out what hole the shell went in. But if he should get a chance to pick up the shell.., maybe.. well, who knew?
“Can you walk?” the cop was asking the woman named Mary. His tone was grotesquely solicitous. “Is anything broken?”
“What difference does it make?” Her voice was trembling, but David thought it was rage making that tremble, not fear. “Kill me if you’re going to, get it over with.”
David glanced at the old guy who was in the cell with him, wanting to see if the old guy had also noticed the shell. So far as David could tell, he hadn’t, although he had finally gotten off the bunk and come to the cell bars.
Instead of yelling at the woman who had tried her very best to blow his head off, or maybe hurting her for it, the cop gave her a brief one-armed hug. A pal’s hug. In a way, David found this seemingly sincere little gesture of affection more unsettling than all the violence which had gone before it. “I’m not going to kill you, Mare!”
The cop looked around, as if to ask the remaining three Carvers and the white-haired guy if they could believe this crazy lady. His bright gray eyes met David’s blue ones, and the boy took an unplanned step back from the bars. He felt suddenly weak with horror. And vulnerable. How he could feel more vulnerable than he already was he didn’t know, but he did.
The cop’s eyes were empty—so empty that it was almost as if he were unconscious with them open.
This made David think of his friend Brian, and his one memorable visit to Brian’s hospital room last November. But it wasn’t the same, because at the same time the cop’s eyes were empty, they weren’t.
There was something there, yes, something, and David didn’t know what it was, or how it could be both something and nothing. He only knew he had never seen anything like it.
The cop looked back at the woman called Mary with an expression of exaggerated astonishment.
“Gosh, no!” he said. “Not when things are just getting interesting.” He reached into his right front pocket, brought out a ring of keys, and selected one that hardly looked like a key at all—it was square, with a black strip embedded in the center of the metal. To David it looked a little like a hotel key-card. He poked this into the lock of the big cell and opened it. “Hop in, Mare,” he said. “Snug as a bug in a rug, that’s what you’ll be.”
She ignored him, looking instead at David’s parents. They were standing together at the bars of the little cell directly across from the one David was sharing with white-haired Mr. Silent. “This man—this maniac—killed my husband. Put. . .“ She swallowed, grimacing, and the big cop looked at her benignly, seeming almost to smile encouragement: Get this out, Mary, sick it up, you’ll feel better when you do.
“Put his arm around him like he did me just now, and shot him four times.
“He killed our little girl,” Ellen Carver told her, and something in her tone struck David with a moment of utter dreamlike unreality. It was as if the two of them were playing Can You Top This. Next the woman named Mary would say, Well, he killed our dog and then his mother would say— “We don’t know that,”
David’s father said. He looked horrible, face swollen and bloody, like a heavyweight boxer who has taken twelve full rounds of punishment. “Not for sure.” He looked at the cop, a terrible expression of hope on his swollen face, but the cop ignored him. It was Mary he was interested in.
“That’s enough chit-chat,” he said. He sounded like the world’s kindliest grandpa. “Hop into your room Mary-mine. Into your gilded cage, my little blue-eyed parakeet.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me?”
“I already told you I won’t,” he said in that same Kind Old Gramps voice, “but you don’t want to forget the world-renowned fate worse than death.” His voice hadn’t changed, but she was now looking up at him raptly, like a staked goat at an approaching boa constrictor. “I can hurt you, Mary,” he said. “I can hurt you so badly you’ll wish I had killed you. Now, you believe that, don’t you?”
She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her eyes away—and that was just what it felt like to David from his place twenty feet away, her pulling free, the way you’d pull a piece of tape off the flap of a letter or a package—and walked into the cell. Her face shivered as she went, then broke apart as the cop slammed the cell s barred door behind her. She threw herself onto one of the four bunks at the rear, put her face into her arms, and began to sob. The cop stood watching her for a moment head lowered.
David had time to look down at the shotgun shell again and think about grabbing it. Then the big cop jerked and kind of shook himself, like someone waking from a doze, and turned away from the cell with the sobbing woman in it. He walked across to where David was standing.
The white-haired man retreated rapidly from the bars as the cop came, until the backs of his knees struck the edge of the bunk and he folded down to a sitting position. Then he put his hands over his eyes again. Before, that had seemed like a gesture of despair to David, but now it seemed to echo the horror he himself had felt when the cop’s stare had fallen upon him—not despair but the instinctive hiding gesture of someone who will not look at a thing unless absolutely forced to look.
“How’s it going, Tom?” the cop asked the man on the bunk. “How they hanging, oldtimer?”
Mr. White Hair shrank away from the sound of the voice without taking his hands away from his eyes.
The cop looked at him a moment longer, then turned his gray gaze on David again. David found he couldn’t look away—now it was his eyes that had been taped. And there was something else, wasn’t there. A sense of being called.
“Having fun, David?” the big blond cop asked. His eyes seemed to be expanding, turning into bright gray ponds filled with light. “Are you filling this interlude, measure for measure?”
“I—” It came out a dusty croak. He licked his lips and tried again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you? I wonder about that. Because I see He raised one hand to the corner of his mouth, touched it, then dropped it again. The expression on his face seemed to be one of genuine puzzlement. “I don’t know what I see. It’s a question, yes sir, it is. Who are you, boy?”