As soon as possible.
In the echoes of the caller's voice, she could hear desperation and trouble. The caller wanted the man to come to his place right away. Which is probably what the man would do instead of coming back home, especially if he had one of those deals where you could snag your phone messages with one of those little black jobbies.
Which meant that if Denise wanted to confront the man, and tell him how much money she wanted to keep quiet, she was going to have to do it at the caller's address. If, that is, she could find the caller's name and address in the phone book.
At first she thought of the incredible hassle it would be to get back on a bus and be taken to God knew where. It could literally be another three hours. But then she remembered the cash in her coat. She didn't have to rely on a bus. She could call a cab. She had plenty of money.
Keeping the caller's name fresh in her mind by repeating it over and over to herself, she took the flashlight and started looking for a phone directory. After a ten-minute search, she spotted one in a kitchen drawer. By then she'd repeated the caller's name so many times, it was gibberish, the way you could say the word spoon or clock so many times, it ceased to have all meaning.
She found the caller's name and address with no problem, writing them down on a paper napkin she found in the same drawer.
Putting the flashlight back where she'd found it, she drifted toward the back door. In the moonlight the shards of broken glass looked terrible, spoiling the nice, if empty, look of the place.
Shrugging, feeling guilty about making such a mess, she rummaged around in the kitchen closet till she found a broom. Having no luck finding a dustpan, she went over to the green plastic garbage receptacle and fished out a TV dinner cover. She folded the cover in half and went over and swept all the glass up into the fold. It made a fine dustpan.
In ten minutes she had all the glass swept up. All that bothered her then were the holes in the window; bone-chilling night air flowed through them. Ultimately the wind would make the whole house cold.
She realized how weird it was, of course, feeling driven to patch up the same place she'd broken into, but she couldn't help it. Her mother had always taught her to lend a hand when a hand was needed, and one was certainly needed there.
She found some heavy tape in a drawer and then dug out a carton container from the garbage, fashioning two pieces of material that would cover both holes. When she was finished, she stood back and assessed her handiwork. All in all the patches didn't look so bad. The trouble was, they wouldn't last too long. Cold air would freeze the adhesive surface of the tape, and soon enough the patches would fall off.
But at least she had tried.
Going to the back door, she took the receiver from the wall phone and dialled a cab number. She was pretty familiar with cabs. Sometimes johns would pay the cab fare to bring you to different places to meet them. And she liked cabs. You felt kind of regal or special-or at least a country girl did-riding around in the backseat of what was really a chauffeur-driven vehicle. Or at least that was how she imagined it.
The guy at the cab company sounded kind of grouchy. He said that with this weather, all kinds of cars weren't starting, and so it would be a while. She said okay.
While she waited, she looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. It was a huge new fridge, and all the guy had in it was a dried-out apple, some cottage cheese that was already three weeks beyond the fresh date and smelled like it, and one lone egg that sat pathetically in the back, like a deserted child.
Disappointed, she closed the door and started searching the cupboards. Unless she planned to dine on salt and sugar, she was out of luck.
Then she remembered the freezer in the basement, the long white chest model, like the one her father had always been promising to buy her mother.
Maybe in the freezer she'd find something she could pop into the microwave oven. Something that would fortify her for what would probably be a long night ahead.
She went over to the door leading to the lower level and started descending the stairs, the flashlight chasing away shadows the way a cat would chase away mice caught in a bam.
All she could think about was the freezer and the great stuff that might be inside. Maybe he'd have a few of those burger-and-fries deals that took just four minutes (the way they were advertised on TV) before they sat, steamy and succulent, before you on the table.
She headed straight for the freezer, ready to throw back the lid.
17
For dinner Greg Wagner fixed himself a cheeseburger, cut himself a piece of pumpkin pie, and poured himself a glass of skim milk. As if the skim milk would compensate for the pie and the cheeseburger.
But for once he wasn't worrying about his weight. He was too excited over what he'd found that afternoon on one of Emma's computer directories, one he'd never seen before. He hated to think about it, but maybe Emma hadn't been quite the "intimate" friend he'd always imagined. After he read this directory, it was obvious that Emma had kept secrets from him. Important secrets.
Just before eating, he'd called Brolan-twice, in fact-both times leaving anxious messages.
After finishing his meal, he wheeled his chair into the living room and put on a new videotape he'd bought from a mail order house in Missouri, run by a mysterious man who wrote very good and very disturbing horror fiction. The man's second book had given Wagner nightmares for several weeks after he finished it.
The name of the tape was The Falcon in Danger. Even though the Falcon movies of the forties had been dismissed by the critics of their time to be little more than B-movie action fodder, Wagner found them endlessly fascinating and nearly always charming. He especially liked the ones with Tom Conway, who had replaced his more famous brother, George Sanders, halfway through the series run. Conway was more boyish and vulnerable than the somewhat cynical Sanders, and for all of Sanders's drollery, Conway was the more believable ladies' man of the pair. The only thing Conway couldn't do with much credibility was throw a punch. In The Falcon in Mexico he knocked out a man with the worst movie punch Wagner had ever seen. Without meaning any disrespect, Wagner had laughed out loud when he'd first seen the punch. It was that memorably bad.
He watched the new Falcon tape the way he watched all his tapes at night, with all the lights out and only the TV screen providing illumination. He liked the warm glow the screen gave off. Knowing that it was snowy and cold outside and that he was safe and warm inside with a fine movie to watch always made him feel snug and cosy. He supposed it all reminded him of his early boyhood, when his parents had bought a twenty-one-inch Sylvania monster with a glowing frame around the screen. He could still recall how whitely the frame radiated, how soft and pleasant its radiance had seemed in the I Love Lucy darkness.
He never would have seen the girl if he hadn't needed to go get another Diet Coke. He had no idea how long she'd been standing on the kerb across the street, leaning against a tree, staring at the duplex.
On his way back from the kitchen he saw her out the front window, through the part in the curtains. She couldn't have been there too long. The bitter temperature wouldn't have permitted it.
At first he tried to dismiss her. She was probably waiting for a ride. She was probably staring at the duplex because there wasn't anything else to stare at. Anyway, she was just a girl, a teenage girl, and she didn't have anything to do with him at all.
The Falcon in Danger proved to be a real treat. It was better than a locked-room mystery; it was a locked-aeroplane puzzle. The associate of a leading industrialist was found dead after the plane on which he was riding crash-landed at an airport-without anybody else aboard, including a pilot. Where had everybody gone? As usual, Wagner made mental note of all the character actors. He liked most of them even more than he liked the big stars. For one thing, character actors usually had juicier roles, and for another, they were fun to follow from one picture to another. The same man might play, in 1942, say, a Mexican assassin, a Nazi spy, and a notorious western gunslinger. His favourite character actor of all was Elisha Cook, Jr., who usually stuck to film noir roles.