I wonder how they’d like it if I set them on fire? a part of her asked coolly, and she squeezed her eyes shut in guilty horror. It was nasty to think that way. It was bad.
Charlie reached out, grasped the HOT shower faucet, and shut it off with a sudden hard twist of her wrist. For the next two minutes she stood shivering and clutching her slight body under the ice-cold, needling spray, wanting to get out, not allowing herself to.
When you had bad thoughts, you had to pay for them.
Deenie had told her so.
2
Andy woke up a little at a time, vaguely aware of the drumming sound of the shower. At first it had been part of a dream: he was on Tashmore Pond with his grandfather and he was eight years old again, trying to get a squirming nightcrawler onto his hook without sticking the hook into his thumb. The dream had been incredibly vivid. He could see the splintery wicker creel in the bow of the boat, he could see the red tire patches on Granther McGee’s old green boots, he could see his own old and wrinkled first baseman’s mitt, and looking at it made him remember that he had Little League practice tomorrow at Roosevelt Field. But this was tonight, the last light and the drawing dark balanced perfectly on the cusp of twilight, the pond so still that you could see the small clouds of midges and noseeums skimming over its surface, which was the colour of chrome. Heat lightning flashed intermittently… or maybe it was real lightening, because it was raining. The first drops darkened the wood of Granther’s dory, weatherbeaten white, in penny-sized drops. Then you could hear it on the lake, a low and mysterious hissing sound, like-
–like the sound of a-
–shower, Charlie must be in the shower.
He opened his eyes and looked at an unfamiliar beamed ceiling. Where are we?
It fell back into place a piece at a time, but there was an instant of frightened free-fall that came of having been in too many places over the last year, of having too many close shaves and being under too much pressure. He thought longingly of his dream and wished he could be back in it with Granther McGee, who had been dead for twenty years now.
Hastings Glen. He was in Hastings Glen. They were in Hastings Glen.
He wondered about his head. It hurt, but not like last night, when that bearded guy had let them off: The pain was down to a steady low throb. If this one followed previous history, the throb would be just a faint ache by this evening, and entirely gone by tomorrow.
The shower was turned off:
He sat up in bed and looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven.
“Charlie?”
She came back into the bedroom, rubbing herself vigorously with a towel.
“Good morning, Daddy.” “Good morning. How are you?” “Hungry,” she said. She went over to the chair where she had put her clothes and picked up the green blouse. Sniffed it. Grimaced. “I need to change my clothes.” “You’ll have to make do with those for a while, babe. We’ll get you something later on today.”
“I hope we don’t have to wait that long to eat.”
“We’ll hitch a ride,” he said, “and stop at the first cafe was come to.”
“Daddy, when I started school, you told me never to ride with strangers.” She was into her underpants and green blouse, and was looking at him curiously.
Andy got out of bed, walked over to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “The devil you don’t know is sometimes better than the one you do,” he said. “Do you know what that means, keed?”
She thought about it carefully. The devil they knew was those men from the Shop, she guessed. The men that had chased them down the street in New York the day before. The devil they didn’t know-
“I guess it means that most people driving cars don’t work for that Shop,” she said.
He smiled back. “You got it. And what I said before still holds, Charlie: when you get into a bad fix, you sometimes have to do things you’d never do if things were going good.”
Charlie’s smile faded. Her face became serious, watchful. “Like getting the money to come out of the phones?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And it wasn’t bad?”
“No. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t bad.”
“Because when you get into a bad fix, you do what you have to do to get out of it.”
“With some exceptions, yes.”
“What are exceptions, Daddy?”
He ruffled her hair. “Never mind now, Charlie. Lighten up.”
But she wouldn’t. “And I didn’t mean to set that man’s shoes on fire. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“No, of course you didn’t.”
Then she did lighten up; her smile, so much like Vicky’s, came out radiantly. “How does your head feel this morning, Daddy?”
“Much better, thanks.”
“Good.” She looked at him closely. “Your eye looks funny.”
“Which eye?”
She pointed at his left. “That one.”
“Yeah?” He went into the bathroom and wiped a clear place on the steamed mirror.
He looked at his eye for a long time, his good humor fading. His right eye looked just as it always had, a gray green-the color of the ocean on an overcast spring day. His left eye was also gray green, but the white was badly bloodshot, and the pupil looked smaller than the right pupil. And the eyelid had a peculiar droop that he had never noticed before.
Vicky’s voice suddenly rang into his mind. It was so clear that she might have been standing beside him. The headaches, they scare me, Andy. You’re doing something to yourself as well as to other people when you use that push or whatever you want to call it.
The thought was followed by the image of a balloon being blown up… and up… and up… and finally exploding with a loud bang.
He began to go over the left side of his face carefully, touching it everywhere with the tips of his right fingers. He looked like a man in a TV commercial marveling over the closeness of his shave. He found three spots-one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the left temple-where there was no feeling at all. Fright drifted through the hollow places in his body like quiet early-evening mist. The fright was not so much for himself as it was for Charlie, for what would happen to her if she got left on her own.
As if he had called her, he could see her beyond him in the mirror.
“Daddy?” She sounded a little scared. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he said. His voice sounded good. There was no tremor in it; nor was it too confident, falsely booming. “Just thinking how much I need a shave.” She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Scratchy like a Brillo pad. Yuck. Gross.” He chased her into the bedroom and rubbed his scratchy cheek against her smooth one. Charlie giggled and kicked.
3
As Andy was tickling his daughter with his stubbly beard, Orville Jamieson, aka OJ, aka The Juice, and another Shop agent named Bruce Cook were getting out of a light-blue Chevy outside the Hastings Diner.
OJ paused for a moment, looking down Main Street with its slant parking, its appliance store, its grocery store, its two gas stations, its one drugstore, its wooden municipal building with a plaque out front commemorating some historical event no one gave a shit about. Main Street was also Route 40, and the McGees were not four miles from where OJ and Bruce Cook now stood.
“Look at this burg,” OJ said, disgusted. “I grew up close to here. Town called Lowville. You ever hear of Lowville, New York?” Bruce Cook shook his head.
“It’s near Utica, too. Where they make Utica Club beer. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day I got out of Lowville.” OJ reached under his jacket and readjusted The Windsucker in its holster.