with a lot of legs and feelers, I’m going straight to a divorce lawyer.”
The cord slipped free. She pulled open the pillowcase, and looked
inside.
“Oh, God.” Bobby took a couple of steps backward.
“No, not that,” she assured him.
“No bugs. Just more cash.” She reached into the sack and withdrew a
couple of bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
“If it’s all hundreds, there could be as much as a quarter of a million
in here.”
“What’s Frank doing?” Bobby wondered.
“Laundering money for the mob in the Twilight Zone?” Hollow, lonely,
tuneless piping pierced the air again, and like a needle pulling thread,
the sound brought with it a draft that rustled the curtain.
Shivering, Julie turned to look at the bed.
The flowerlike notes faded with the draft, then soon rose again, faded,
rose, and faded a fourth time as Frank Pollard reappeared. He was on
his side, arms against his chest, hands fisted, grimacing, his eyes
squeezed shut, as if he were preparing himself to receive the killing
blow of an ax.
Julie stepped toward the bed, and again Hal stopped her.
Frank sucked in a deep breath, shuddered, made a low anguished mewling,
opened his eyes-and vanished. Within two or three seconds, he appeared
yet again, still shuddering. But immediately he vanished, reappeared,
vanished, reappeared, vanished, as if he were an image flickering on a
television set with poor signal reception. At last he stuck fast to the
fabric of reality and lay on the bed, moaning.
After rolling off his side, onto his back, he gazed at the ceiling. He
raised his fists from his chest, uncurled them, and stared at his hands,
baffled, as if he had never seen fingers before.
“Frank?” Julie said. He did not respond to her. With his fingertips
he explored the contours of his face, as if a Braille reading of his
features would recall to him the forgotten specifics of his appearance.
Julie’s heart was racing, and every muscle in her body felt as if it had
been twisted up as tight as an overwound clock spring. She was not
afraid, really. It was not a tension engineered by fear but by the
sheer strangeness of what had happened.
“Frank, are you okay?”
Blinking through the interstices of his fingers, he said, “O It’s you,
Mrs. Dakota. Yeah… Dakota. What’s happened Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital now,” Bobby said.
“Listen, the important question isn’t where you are, but where the hell
had you been?”
“Been? Well… what do you mean?” Frank tried to sit up in bed, but
he seemed to temporarily lack the strength to get off his back.
Picking up the bed controls, Bobby elevated the upper half of the
mattress.
“You weren’t in this room during most of the last few hours. It’s
almost five in the morning, and you’ve been jumping in and out of here
like… like… like a crew remember of the Starship Enterprise who
keeps beaming back up to the mothership!”
“Enterprise? Beaming up? What’re you talking about?”
Bobby looked at Julie. “Whoever this guy is, wherever he comes from, we
now know for sure that he’s been living past the edge of modern culture,
on the fringe. You ever know a modern American who hasn’t at least
heard of Star Trek?
To Bobby, Julie said, “Thanks for your analysis, Mr. Spock.”
“Mr. Spock?” Frank said.
“See!” Bobby said.
“We can question Frank later,” Julie said.
“He’s confuse right now, anyway. We’ve got to get him out of here. If
the nurse comes back and sees him, how do we explain his reappearance?
Is she really going to believe he wandered back into the hospital, past
security and the nursing staff, up six floors with nobody spotting him?”
“Yeah,” Hal said,
“and though he seems to be back good, what if he pops away again, in
front of her eyes?”
“Okay, so we’ll get him out of bed and sneak him dow those stairs at the
end of the hall,” Julie said,
“out to the car.
As they talked about him, Frank turned his head back and forth,
following the conversation. He appeared to be watching a tennis match