"Something happened?"
"Sort of."
"Want to tell me what?"
"Not right now, no, I j-j-just have to k-k-know where he is. He's coming f-f-for her@'
"Calm down, Howie."
"I k-k-know he's coming for her."
"He doesn't know where you live, Howie."
"He's inside her head, Grillo. He was right. 1-f-ffuck!-haven't stuttered in f-five years." He paused to draw a ragged breath. "I thought it was over. At least w-w-with him."
"We all did."
"I th-th-thought he was gone and it was over. But he's ss-still there, inside her. So d-d-don't tell me he doesn't know where w-w-we live. He knows exactly."
"Where are you right now?" "At a gas station half a mile from the house. I didn't want to c-c-call from there."
:'You'd better get back there. Have you got any weapons?"
'I got a handgun. But what the fuck use is th-th-th-that g-g-going, going to be? I mean, if he's alive-"
"He's cheated death."
"And a handgun ain't going' to be a h-h-hell of a lot of good." :'Shit."
'Yeah, man, right. Shit. Right. That's what it, what it, what it is. It's fucking shit!" Grillo heard him slam his fist against the phone. Then there was a muffled sound. It took him a moment to realize Katz was weeping.
"Listen, Howie-" The muffled sound went on. He'd put his hand over the phone, to keep Grillo from hearing. I know that feeling, Grillo thought to himself. If I cry and nobody hears, maybe I didn't cry at all.
Except that it didn't work that way. "Howie? Are you there?" There was a moment or two of silence, then Howie came back on the line. The tears had calmed him a little. "I'm here," he said.
"I'm going to drive up there. We'll work this out, somehow." :'Yeah?"
'Meantime, I want you to stay put. Understand me?"
"What if he... I mean, what if h-h-he comes for her?" "Do what you have to do. Move if you have to move. But I'll keep checking in, okay?"
"Yeah.
"Anything else?" "He's not going to get her, Grillo."
"I know that."
"Whatever the f-f-fuck it takes, he's not going to get her."
What have I done? That was all Grillo could think when he'd put the phone down: What have I done volunteering for this? He couldn't help Howie. Jesus, he could barely help himself.
He sat in front of the screens-which were filling up like barrels in a cloudburst: news coming in from every state, all of it bad-and tried to work out some way to withdraw the offer, but he knew he'd not be able to live with himself if he turned his back and something happened.
The fact was, something would happen. If not tonight, tomorrow night. If not tomorrow night, the night after. The world was losing its wits. The evidence was right there on the screens in front of him. What better time for the resurrected to settle their scores? He had to do what he could, however little, however meaningless, or else never meet his gaze in the mirror again.
He turned off the screens and went up to pack an overnight bag. He was just about finished, when the telephone rang. This time it was Tesla, calling from Everville.
"I'm going to be staying with a woman I met here. She needs some company right how. Have you got a pen?" Grillo took the number, then gave her a brief update on the Katz situation. She didn't sound all that surprised. "There's a lot of endgames going to get played this weekend," she said. He told her he was going to drive up to Howie's. Then the conversation turned to the subject of D'Amour.
"I always thought his totems and his tattoos were so much shit," Grillo said, "but right now-"
"You wish you had one of them?"
"I wish I had something I believed in," Grillo said. "Something that'd actually do some good if Tommy-Ray is on the loose."
"Oh he's probably loose," Tesla said grimly. "Just about everything that could be loose is loose right now."
Grillo chewed on this for a moment. Then he said, "What the fuck did we do to deserve this, Tes?"
"Just lucky, I guess."
The storm that had broken over the Katzes' house moved steadily southwest, unloading its burden of rain as it went. There were a number of collisions on the slackened streets and highways, all but one of them inconsequential. The exception occurred one hundred and fifty-five miles from the house, on Interstate 84. An RV carrying a family of six, on their way home from a vacation in Cedar City, swerved on the treacherous asphalt, struck a car in the adjacent lane, and crossed the divide, taking out half a dozen vehicles traveling south before it plunged off the side of the highway.
The police, medics, and fire crews were at the scene with remarkable speed given that the highway was blocked in both directions, and the rain so torrential it reduced visibility to fifteen yards, but by the time they arrived, five lives had already ebbed away, and another three people-including the driver of the RV-were dead before they could be cut from the wreckage.
Almost as though it was intrigued by the chaos it had wrought, the storm slowed its progress and lingered over the accident scene for the better part of half an hour, its deluge weighing down the smoke that poured from the burning vehicles. In a bitter, blinding soup of smoke and rain, rescued and rescuers alike moved like phantoms, stinking and stained with blood and gasoline. Some of the survivors were lucky enough to weep; most simply stumbled from fire to fire, body to body, as if looking for their wits.
But there was one phantom here who was neither a rescuer nor in need of rescue; who moved through the hellish confusion with an ease that would inspire nightmares in all who saw him.
He was young, this phantom, and by all accounts indecently handsome: blond, tanned and smiling a wide, white smile. And he was singing. It was this, more than his easy saunter, more than his easy smile, that distressed those who spoke of him later. That he went from wreck to wreck with this bland, nameless jingle on his lips was nothing short of demoniacal.
He did not go unchallenged, however. A police officer found him reaching into the backseat of one of the wrecked vehicles and demanded he instantly desist. The phantom ignored the order and smashed the back window, reaching in for something he'd seen on the seat. Again, the officer ordered that he stop, and drew his gun to enforce his order. By way of response the phantom ceased his singing long enough to say, "I got business here."
Then, resuming the melody where he'd left off, he pulled the body of a child, her pitiful corpse overlooked in the chaos, out through the broken window. The officer leveled his weapon at the thief s heart, and ordered him to put the child down, but this, like the rest of the orders, was ignored. Slinging the body around his shoulders like a shepherd carrying a lamb, the phantom made to depart. What followed was witnessed by five individuals, including the officer, all of them in highly agitated states, but none so traumatized as to be hallucinating. Their testimonies, however, were outlandish. Turning his back on the officer, the corpse-stealer started to amble off towards the embankment, and as he did so a convulsion ran through the smoke around him, and for a moment or two it seemed to the witnesses there were human forms in the billows-their faces long and wretched, their bodies sinewy but softened, as though they'd had their bones sucked out of them-fonns that were plainly in the thief's employ, because they closed around him in a moaning cloud which no one, not even the officer, was willing to breach.
Five hours later, the body of the child-a three year old called Lorena Hernandez-was discovered less than a mile from the highway, in a small copse of birch trees. She had been stripped of her blood-stained clothing and her body carefully, even lovingly, washed in rain water. Then her little corpse had been arranged on the wet ground in a fetal position: legs tucked up snug against her belly, chin against her chest. There was no sign of any sexual molestation. The eyes, however, had gone from her head.