Nora said, “If they find him . .
“They won’t.”
“But if they do, what then?”
“I’ll never give him up,” Travis said. “Never.”
8
By eleven o’clock that night, Deputy Porter’s headless corpse and the mutilated
body of the construction foreman had been removed from Bordeaux Ridge by the
coroner’s men. A cover story had been concocted and delivered to the reporters
at the police barricades, and the press had seemed to buy it; they had asked
their questions, had taken a couple of hundred photographs, and had filled a few
thousand feet of videotape with images that would be edited down to a hundred
seconds on tomorrow’s TV newscast. (In this age of mass murder and terrorism,
two victims rated no more than two minutes’ airtime: ten seconds for lead-in, a
hundred seconds for film, ten seconds for the well-coiffed anchorpersons to look
respectfully grim and saddened—then on to a story about a bikini contest, a
convention of Edsel owners, or a man who claimed to have seen an alien
spacecraft shaped like a Twinkie.) The reporters were gone now, as were the lab
men, the uniformed deputies, and all of Lemuel Johnson’s agents except Cliff
Soames.
Clouds hid the fragment moon. The kliegs were gone, and the only light came from
the headlamps of Walt Gaines’s car. He had swung his sedan around and aimed his
lights at Lem’s car, which was parked at the end of the unpaved street, so Lem
and Cliff would not have to fumble around in the dark. In the deep gloom beyond
the headlamps, half-framed houses loomed like the fossilized skeletons of
prehistoric reptiles.
As he walked toward his car, Lem felt as good as he could feel under the
circumstances. Walt had agreed to allow federal authorities to assume
jurisdiction without a challenge. Although Lem had broken a dozen regulations
and had violated his secrecy oath by telling Walt the details of the Francis
Project, he was sure Walt could keep his mouth shut. The lid was still on the
case, a bit looser than it had been, perhaps, but still in place.
Cliff Soames reached the car first, opened the door, and got in on the
passenger’s side, and as Lem opened the driver’s door he heard Cliff say, “Oh,
Jesus, oh God.” Cliff was scrambling back out of the car even as Lem looked in
from the other side and saw what the uproar was about. A head.
Teel Porter’s head, no doubt.
It was on the front seat of the car, propped so it was facing Lem when he opened
the door. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone.
Reeling back from the car, Lem reached under his coat and pulled his revolver.
Walt Gaines was already out of his car, his own revolver in hand, running toward
Lem. “What’s wrong?”
Lem pointed.
Reaching the NSA sedan, Walt looked through the open door and let out a thin,
anguished sound when he saw the head.
Cliff came around from the other side of the car, gripping his gun, with the
muzzle pointed straight up. “The damn thing was here when we arrived, while we
were in the house.”
“Might still be here,” Lern said, anxiously surveying the darkness that crowded
them on all sides, beyond the beams from the patrol car’s headlights.
Studying the night-swaddled housing development, Walt said, “We’ll call in my
men, get a search under way.”
“No point to it,” Lem said. “The thing will take off if it sees your men
returning . . . if it’s not gone already.”
They were standing at the edge of Bordeaux Ridge, beyond which lay miles of open
land, foothills and mountains, out of which The Outsider had come and into which
it could disappear again. Those hills, ridges, and canyons were only vague forms
in the meager glow of the partial moon, more sensed than Seen.
From somewhere down the unlighted street came a loud clatter, as if a pile of
lumber or shingles had been knocked over.
“It is here,” Walt said.
“Maybe,” Lem said. “But we’re not going to go looking for it in the dark, not
just the three of us. That’s what it wants.”