remembered Thomas.
The possibility that Thomas had told this man-and perhaps others-about
Candy was most frightening to Candy since his mother’s death. His
service in God’s army of avengers was a deeply private matter, a secret
should not have been spread beyond the Pollard family.
mother had warned him that it was all right to be proud doing God’s
work, but that his pride would lead him to a if he boasted of his divine
favor to others.
“Satan,” she told him, “constantly seeks the names of lieutenants in
Garrny-which is what you are-and when he finds them, destroys them with
worms that eat them alive from wit worms fat as snakes, and he rains
fire on them too. If you can’t keep the secret, you’ll die and go to
Hell for your big mouth.”
“Candy,” Clint said.
The use of his name erased whatever doubt remained that the secret had
been passed outside the family and that Candy was in deep trouble,
though he had not broken the code of silence himself.
He imagined that even now Satan, in some dark and steaming place, had
tilted his head and said,
“Who? Who did you say? What was his name? Candy? Candy who?” As
furious as he was frightened, Candy started around the kitchen table,
wondering if Clint had learned about him from Thomas. He was determined
to break the man, make him talk before killing him.
In a move as unexpected as his rock-calm acceptance of the woman’s
murder, Clint reached inside his jacket, withdrew a revolver, and fired
two shots.
He might have fired more than two, but those were the only ones Candy
heard. The first round hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest,
pitching him backward. Fortunately he sustained no damage to his head
or heart. If his brain tissue had been scrambled, disturbing the
mysterious and fragile connection between brain and mind, leaving his
mind trapped within his ruined brain before he had a chance to separate
the two, he would not have possessed the mental ability to teleport,
leaving him vulnerable to a coup de grace. And if his heart had been
stopped instantaneously by a well-placed bullet, before he could
dematerialize, he would have fallen down dead where he’d stood. Those
were the only wounds that might finish him. He was many things, but he
was not immortal; so he was grateful to God for letting him get out of
that kitchen and back to his mother’s house alive.
THE VENTURA FREEWAY. Julie drove fast, though not as fast as she had
earlier. On the tapedeck: Artie Shaw’s “Night mare.” Bobby brooded,
staring through the side window at the nightscape. He could not stop
thinking about the blare of words that had seared through him, loud as a
bomb blast and bright as a blast-furnace fire. He had come to terms
with the dream that had frightened him last week; everyone had bad
dreams. Thouflown from him, but it had been too short to attract
notice. The explosion of the glass and the tinny clanging of the blinds
had been loud enough, but the action had been over before anyone could
have located the source of the sound.
A four-lane street encircled the Fashion Island shopping center and also
served the office towers that, like this one, stood on the outer rim.
Apparently, however, no cars had been on it when the man had fallen.
Now two appeared to the left, one behind the other. Both passed without
slowing. A row of shrubberies, between the sidewalk and the street,
prevented motorists from seeing the corpse where it lay. The
office-tower ring of the sprawling complex was clearly not an area that
attracted pedestrians at night, so the dead man might remain
undiscovered until morning.
He looked across the street, at the restaurants and stores that were on
this flank of the mall, five or six hundred yards away. A few people on
foot, shrunken by distance, moved between the parked cars and the
entrances to the businesses. No one appeared to have seen anything-and
in fact it would not have been that easy to spot a darkly dressed man
plunging past a mostly dark building, aloft and visible for only seconds