He drove an interminable distance on Sepulveda before he finally located a pay phone that suited his needs. It was in a back corner of a supermarket parking lot, eighty or a hundred yards from the store.
He parked the van at an angle, screening the phone from everyone at the market and from motorists passing on Sepulveda. It was not a booth, just one of those plastic windscreens that were supposed to provide excellent sound-proofing but which had no effect at all on background noise; but at least it appeared to be in service, and it was private enough. A high cement block fence rose behind it, separating the supermarket property from the fringes of a housing tract. On the right, a cluster of shrubs and two small palms shielded the phone from the side street leading off Sepulveda. No one was likely to see him well enough to realize he was hurt; he didn’t want anyone nosing around.
He slid across the seat to the passenger’s side and got out that door. When he looked down at the thick red muck oozing between the fingers that were clamped over the worse wound, he felt dizzy, and he looked quickly away. He only had to take three steps to reach the phone, but each of them seemed like a mile.
He could not remember his telephone credit card number, which had been as familiar to him as his birthdate, so he called collect to Napa Valley.
The operator rang it six times.
“Hello?”
“I have a collect call for anyone from Bruno Frye. Will you accept the charges?”
“Go ahead, operator.”
There was a soft click as she went off the line.
“I’m hurt real bad. I think … I’m dying,” Frye told the man in Napa County.
“Oh, Jesus, no. No!”
“I’ll have to … call an ambulance,” Frye said. “And they … everyone will know the truth.”
They spoke for a minute, both of them frightened and confused.
Suddenly, Frye felt something loosen inside him. Like a spring popping. And a bag of water bursting. He screamed in pain.
The man in Napa County cried out in sympathy, as if he felt the same pain.
“Got to … get an ambulance,” Frye said.
He hung up.
Blood had run all the way down his pants to his shoes, and now it was dribbling onto the pavement.
He lifted the receiver off the hook and put it down on the metal shelf beside the phone box. He picked up a dime from the same shelf, on which he had put his pocket change, but his fingers weren’t working properly; he dropped it and looked down stupidly as it rolled across the macadam. Found another dime. Held this one as tightly as he could. He lifted the dime as if it were a lead disc as big as an automobile tire, finally put it in the proper slot. He tried to dial 0. He didn’t even have enough energy to perform that small chore. His muscle-packed arms, his big shoulders, his gigantic chest, his powerful back, his hard rippled belly, and his massive thighs all failed him. He couldn’t make the call, and he couldn’t even stand up any longer. He fell, rolled over once, and lay face-down on the macadam.
He couldn’t move.
He couldn’t see. He was blind.
It was a very black darkness.
He was scared.
He tried to tell himself that he would come back from the dead as Katherine had done. I’ll come back and get her, he thought. I’ll come back. But he really didn’t believe it.
As he lay there getting increasingly light-headed, he had a surprisingly lucid moment when he wondered if he had been all wrong about Katherine coming back from the dead. Had it been his imagination? Had he just been killing women who resembled her? Innocent women? Was he mad?
A new explosion of pain blew those thoughts away and forced him to consider the smothering darkness in which he lay.
He felt things moving on him.
Things crawling on him.
Things crawling on his arms and legs.
Things crawling on his face.
He tried to scream. Couldn’t.
He heard the whispers.