“Anything you say, Mister Fletcher. You’re GCN’s only consulting/contributing editor without a cable hookup.”
“It keeps me fresh.”
“Actually, I believe it does. Is there anything else you need for now?”
“Nothing you can do for me. Thanks, Andy.”
“A su órdenes, señor.”
FLETCH SAT A long moment, half in, half out of the car, dead telephone in hand.
Even though dressed just in cotton shorts and shirt, he was soaked with sweat. Always he had noticed builders in this area of the South never left trees, or any source of shade, in their parking lots. Trees are pretty, give shade, lessen the need for air-conditioning, but golly gee, take up as much as a square foot of ground space.
Instead of thinking about all that perplexed him, Fletch sat in the sun thinking of trees.
Slowly, he pressed Alston Chambers’s office number into the telephone’s panel.
The secretary put him right through.
“You guys are okay?” Fletch asked.
“The first so-called aftershock broke my whole shelf of Steuben glass,” Alston said. “Every piece of it. Including my best golf trophy.”
“Why would a Californian have Steuben glass on a shelf?” Fletch asked.
“Where was I supposed to put it?” Alston nearly shouted. “Between two mattresses on a gimbal table?”
“Sounds good.”
“Busted pipes. I had to shave with Apollonaris.”
“Sorry. Did it tickle?”
“This bouncin’ around out here is gettin’ tiresome, Fletch.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“People drive along looking at the tops of buildings and they run smack into each other. From one thing and another, there’s glass all over the streets out here.”
“There’s an idea.”
“What?”
“Go into the glass business.”
“Are you still in the smokehouse?”
“I wish I were. I’m in a very hot parking lot.”
“You and Carrie all right?”
“Fine.”
“Where’s your so-called son?”
“In Greece.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’m hot and tired. Sun-dazed. Nothing makes any sense.”
“You didn’t make any sense last time you called, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is a Crystal Faoni extant. And at the moment she is incommunicado at a place called Blathering Spooks or something in some place called Up-and-At-’Em, Wisconsin, or somewhere. I’ve got it right here.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got it, too. When I called you this morning, I couldn’t get through. Would you believe the telephone company has recorded its message notifying callers of your seismic disturbances?”
“But everything else you said was crazy. Only three men escaped from Tomaston Prison. Their names are Moreno, Leary, and Kriegel. No Faoni.”
“Alston, are you sure?”
“Fletch, I talked with the Attorney General of the state of Kentucky. I talked with the warden of Tomaston Prison. I talked with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. No Faoni.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There never has been a Faoni.”
“What?”
“The federal penitentiary in Tomaston, Kentucky, did not, and never has had an inmate named Faoni.”
“John Fletcher—”
“Not John Fletcher Faoni, not Alexander Faoni, not Betty Boop Faoni. I have just checked the entire federal penal system. There never has been an inmate named John Fletcher Faoni.”
I’m being used, Fletch said to himself. I knew it. I am being involved in something…. But by whom? For what reason? This kid knows about me things only Crystal knows… our tumbling out of the shower… Kriegel recognized a physical similarity…. Carrie said we are similar…. John Fletcher Faoni has not been a prisoner…. He is in Greece…
Alston asked, “Are you fantasizing up a son in your dotage? A big one? One you don’t have to burp?”
Dragging two loaded shopping carts behind him, Jack was crossing the parking lot toward Fletch.
Heat waves from the noonday sun were rising from the pavement in the parking lot.
In fact, Jack was an apparition shimmering in the heat waves like a moving figure in a fun house mirror.
“A fantasy,” Fletch said. “Maybe a fantasy.”
“Fletch, are you all right?”
“I’ve got to hang up, Alston. Hide the phone.”
“Hide the phone?”
Fletch hung up.
And hid the phone.
AS SOON AS JACK loaded his electronic equipment into the back of the station wagon, Carrie appeared with bundles and bundles of milk, cereals, baby food, diapers, soap, cleaning fluids, brushes, mops …
The three of them sat as before in the car.
Almost perfectly silently.
Fletch asked, “Lunch, anyone?”
“Fast food,” Carrie said. “In the car. I’ve got to get back.” Slowly, with jaw jutting, she looked up from Jack’s legs to his waist to his chest to his face. “Before I’m guilty of child abuse, too.”
“If that’s the case,” Jack said, “we have to stop at a drugstore, too.”
“What for?” Carrie still stared at his profile. “You run out of mean pills?”
“Concentrated salt,” Jack said. “To sprinkle on baked ham.”
“What do you want to stop for?” Fletch asked.
“Earplugs.”
Carrie said, “Now there’s a good idea. Get some for us, too.”
“I will.”
As the car rolled forward, Jack slid the tips of the fingers of his right hand down his left forearm. He said, “I’m hardly sweating at all. Must be all that salt I had for breakfast.” Jack looked at Fletch and Carrie. He smiled broadly. “You guys seem to be sweating a whole lot!”
In fact, they were.
13
“Sonsabitches. Damned bastards. I hate to accept their food. In the reclined driver’s seat of the station wagon, Fletch had slept most of the afternoon. He awoke when Carrie opened the door and got into the front passenger seat.
The sun had lowered considerably, but not the temperature.
Carrie handed Fletch a plastic bowl of chili, a plastic spoon, and a can of soda. She had her own bowl of chili and can of soda.
“Then don’t,” Fletch said. “Let’s not eat their food.”
“I have to. I’m starving,” she said. “Anyway, I brought enough food into this place to get something in return.” She looked like she had been ridden hard and put up wet. She tasted her chili. “Yee! It tastes like chopped horned toads and ketchup! These foreigners don’t even know how to make respectable chili!”
Before sleeping, Fletch had parked the station wagon in the shade of the trees not far from his truck, but facing away from the center of the encampment. He was overlooking three rotting trailers around which there were women and children moving slowly if at all in the heat.
He and Carrie had brought the bags of groceries and cleaning materials down to the trailers. Indeed, close up, the women and children did look malnourished. They were listless. Their clothes and their skin were ingrained with dirt. Both the women and children had enough bruises to satisfy Fletch that at least this part of the encampment was ruled by iron fists and steel-toed boots.
A few of the boy children were dressed in little camouflage suits and combat boots. One six-year-old boy was fully dressed in a uniform similar to that worn by Commandant Wolfe, even to the chicken-footprint insignias.
The girl children and women were dressed in cotton shifts thinned by wear. Many were barefoot.
He thought if he slept lightly in the station wagon he could keep a cat’s eye on Carrie as she tried to organize feeding-cleaning-and-washing brigades at the trailers. Surely a yell from her would awaken him no matter how soundly he slept.