to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly,
it wasn’t just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and
sickly. His eyes were more sunken than the whites of them were yellow,
as if he had contracted a disease, and the flesh around them was so
darkly bruised they appeared to as painted fake shiners with black shoe
polish. His skin was paler than pale, a deathly pale and his lips were
bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing. Bobby felt guilty
about having shouted at him, put his free hand on Frank’s shoulder and
told him how sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting
on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out fine-as
long as Frank didn’t take them back to that place again. Frank said,
“Sometimes it’s like I’m almost in touch with the minds of those people,
creatures, whatever they are in that ship.” They were leaning on each
other now, for to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion.
“Maybe I’ve got another gift I’m not aware of, like for all of my life I
wasn’t aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a
corner and tried to kill me. Maybe I’m telepathic. Maybe the
wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that
race’s brain activity. Maybe I feel them out there, even across
billions of light-years of space. Maybe that’s why I feel as if I’m
being drawn to them, called to them.”
Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured
eyes for a long moment. Then he smiled and pinched Frank’s cheek, and
said, “You devil, you’ve really done a lot of thinking about this,
haven’t you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?” Frank
smiled.
Bobby laughed.
Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each
other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their
laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad
laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier. Clinging to his client, he
said, “Frank, your life is chaos, you’re living in chaos, and you can’t
go on like this. It’s going to destroy you.”
“I know.”
“You’ve got to find a way to stop it.”
“There is no way.”
“You’ve got to try, buddy, you’ve got to try. Nobody can handle this. I
couldn’t live like this for one day, and you’ve done it for seven
years!”
“No. It wasn’t this bad most of that time. It’s just lately, the last
few months, it’s accelerated.”
“A few months,” Bobby said wonderingly.
“Hell, if we don’t give your brother the slip soon and get back to the
office and step off this merry-go-round in the next few minutes, I swear
to God I’m going to crack. Frank, I need order, order and stability,
familiarity. I need to know that what I do today will determine where I
am and who I am and what I have to show for it tomorrow. Nice orderly
progression, Frank, cause and effect, logic and reason.” Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
“HOW LONG?”
“Twenty-seven… almost twenty-eight minutes.”
“Where the hell are they?”
“Julie,” Clint said, “I think you ought to sit down. You’re shaking
like a leaf, your color’s not good.”
“I’m all right.” Lee Chen handed her a glass of Scotch. “Have a
drink.”
“No.”
“It might help,” Clint said.
She grabbed the glass from Lee, drained it in a couple of long swallows,
and shoved it back into his hand.
“I’ll get you another,” he said.
“Thanks.” From the sofa, Jackie Jaxx said,
“Listen, is anyone going to sue me over this?” Julie no longer sort of
liked the hypnotist. She loathed as much as she had loathed him when
they had first met in Vegas and taken on his case. She wanted to go
kick his head in. Though she knew the urge to kick him was irrational,
he really had not been the cause of Bobby’s disappearance, but she
wanted to kick him anyway. That was the impulsive side of her, the