Jack's voice shattered the moment: "Time's a-wastin', Bill. We've got to make a stop in Monroe on the way."
Monroe…her home town. Bill's too. Where Rasalom had usurped her child's body at conception. The torrent of memories was cut off as Bill pulled free of her arms.
"Got to go, Carol."
He went to kiss her on the forehead. Impulsively, Carol lifted her face and kissed him on the lips. From the way he pulled back and the way he looked at her, she knew that he hadn't forgotten 1968 either.
"Come back to me, Bill," she said softly. "I don't want to lose you too."
He swallowed, nodded. "Okay. Yeah." His voice was sandpaper dry. "I'll be back. We can talk more about this then." He picked up his duffel and started for the door, then stopped and turned. "I love you, Carol. I can't think of a moment when I didn't."
And then he was gone. But his final words lingered after him, filling Carol with a bewildering mix of emotions. She wanted to laugh with joy; instead she sat on the edge of the bed and cried.
WINS-AM
—and at sea, the QE2 appears to be missing. She was last heard from Sunday evening. It is feared she is sunk. If she had hit one of the gravity anomalies she would have radioed for help. The single air-sea rescue plane that was sent out has found no survivors.
LONG ISLAND
It took Jack longer than he'd planned to get to Monroe. A lot of traffic outbound on the Long Island Expressway. Maybe they thought it would be better out on the Island. He'd talked to Doc Bulmer on the phone this morning, and from what he'd said, things didn't seem a whole hell of a lot quieter out here.
So he did the best speed he could as the wind fluttered and whistled through the rips in the top. Nick sat in the back seat, his zombie stare fixed straight ahead. Bill wasn't much better as company. He sat in the passenger seat and said nothing, just gazed out the window, lost in a world of his own. Jack wondered what was going on between him and that Mrs. Treece. Her husband had run off and left her. Was Bill moving in? He'd been a priest for most of his life. He had a lot of lost time to make up for. Jack couldn't blame him. She was attractive, even if she had a good ten or fifteen years on Jack. But he sensed there was more to it than opportunity knocking. Those two seemed to go back a long way.
So Jack played the radio. A number of stations were gone, nothing but static in their slots on the band, but a few DJs and newsfolk were hanging in there, still playing music, still broadcasting the news, keeping their listeners informed to the best of their ability as to what was fact and what was merely rumor. He had to hand it to them. They had more guts than he would have given them credit for.
He clicked it off. He wasn't in the mood for music.
"So, Bill," he said, jerking his thumb toward the back seat. "How are you going to handle Edgar Cayce back there?"
Bill turned from the window and fixed Jack with a stare.
"Don't make fun of him. He's an old friend of mine and he's a victim, just like a lot of other people these days."
Jack instinctively bristled at the sound of someone telling him what to do, then realized that Bill was right.
"Sorry. I didn't know him before he…before he went down into the hole."
"He was brilliant. Hopefully he'll be brilliant again. A mind like a computer, but a good heart too."
"Bit of a spread in age between the two of you. How'd you meet?"
"I was his father for a few years."
When Jack shot him a questioning look, Bill went on and explained about his years as director of a Jesuit orphanage in Queens, and how a certain little boy had died and how he'd spent five years on the run as a result. The story fascinated Jack. He'd been seeing this guy every day lately and never guessed what kind of a man he was, or the hell he'd been through. How could he? Bill seemed to have built a wall around himself, as if he was practicing being a nobody.
But now that Jack had got a peek over that wall, he decided he liked Bill Ryan.
And besides that, the story made the trip pass faster. Here they were already, in Monroe, on Shore Drive.
Ba must have been watching from one of the windows. He stepped out the front door as they pulled in the driveway. He approached the car with only a Macy's shopping bag dangling from his hand. The Nash lady, Doc Buhner, and the kid, Jeffy, were all clustered at the front door to see him off, like the Cleavers sending an Oriental Wally off to war.
"I'd better get in the back," Bill said. "He'll never fit."
As he shifted to the rear, Jack got out, waved to Ba, then trotted to the front door.
"Glaeken wants me to 'urge' you folks—his word—to come stay with him in the city. He says it's going to get a lot worse out here."
"We'll be okay," the doc said. "We've got our own protection."
Jack glanced around at all the steel storm shades. The place looked like a fortress.
"Maybe you do," he said, nodding. "But I promised him I'd ask."
"You've kept your promise to Glaeken," the Nash lady said softly, and Jack thought he saw tears in her eyes. "Now keep one to me: You bring Ba back, okay?" Her voice sounded like it was going to break. "You bring him back just the way he left, you hear?"
"I hear you, Mrs. Nash," he said.
Jack was touched by her show of emotion. No doubt about it, she genuinely cared about Ba. Had real feeling for the guy. Maybe he'd misjudged her. Maybe she wasn't quite the hardcase she pretended to be.
"Either we both come back," he added, "or neither of us comes back. You've got my word on that."
"I'll hold you to it," she said, her eyes steely blue.
As Jack hurried back to the car he figured he'd damn well better get Ba back safe and sound.
The sign atop the hanger read TWIN AIRWAYS in bold red letters. Tension coiled around Bill's gut as they bumped toward it along a rutted dirt road. Where were they? Somewhere off the Jericho Turnpike was all Bill knew.
And the Ashe brothers. Who were they? He'd never heard of them and didn't know a thing about them and yet he was going to get into a jet and let one of them fly him across the Atlantic. And why? Because this fellow named Jack—who had about a dozen last names and had an immediate avoidance response to anything labeled Police, who carried two or three pistols and God knew how many other weapons at all times, who called his ancient Corvair Ralph and drove it like a maniac—had said the Ashe Brothers were "good guys."
Glaeken, old boy, he thought as Jack skidded to a halt beside the hanger, I hope this trip is worth it.
Two reed-thin, blue-eyed men in their mid-thirties with fair, shoulder-length hair came out to meet them. They might have been mirror images had not one of them sported a stubbly beard and the other a long, droopy mustache. Both wore beat-up jeans so low on their hips they looked ready to fall off; the bearded one wore a purple paisley shirt tucked in behind a Jack Daniels belt buckle. The one with the mustache had on a fringed buckskin jacket over a tee-shirt.
"They look like holdovers from the sixties, Jack," Bill said softly out of the corner of his mouth.
"It's okay. They sort of think they're the Allman Brothers. Not really, of course. I mean, Duane being dead and all. But soul-mates, so to speak. They are from Georgia and they do like the blues, but trust me: You're looking at two of the best damn pilots going. Not a place in the world with an airport they haven't been."
Bill wondered if he had that much trust left in him.