At the other side of the closed bedroom door, Creosote began to whimper. Ryerson said to Joan, "He and I have grown very attached."
"Uh-huh," she said. "Well, let's you and me grow attached, okay."
"I'd like that very much," he whispered.
~ * ~
In Room 1512 of the Buffalo Memorial Hospital, Laurie Drake was still in the fetal position, still had her thumb in her mouthand her eyes open; nearby, a device had been set up to drip a mild salt solution into her eyes every few seconds, so they wouldn't dry out.
"We're getting some response," said Dr. Wayne Chandler to Guy Mallory.
"Oh?" Guy said, uncertain what the doctor was referring to and unwilling to let him know it.
Chandler nodded. "Her EKGs have altered since she was brought in, and now and then she appears to look around the room-moving her eyes only, of course."
"Of course," Mallory said.
"Her coma is deep," Chandler went on, "though not so deep that we see no hope for recovery. I do think she'll be with us a good long time. A month, perhaps. Maybe longer."
Mallory sighed. "Jesus, Doc-"
"Doctor," Chandler corrected him, then smiled an apology. "I'm sorry-I just have this aversion to 'Doc.' You understand, I'm sure."
Mallory said, "Yeah, I understand. I was going to say that I've seen a few like her. You know-people in comas, and I have to ask myself what the hell is going on in their heads. Where they are, you know. Because if they're not here, with us, where are they?"
Chandler nodded. "It's a question all of us ask, Detective. And I wish I could answer it."
But even Laurie Drake could not have answered that question, because language was beyond her, just as language is beyond any fetus. Which is what she was, essentially. A developing organism, something newly created, not yet whole-regardless of the physical evidence to the contrary. Inside her skull, her brain was struggling to renew itself, but in the process of conception, all that was Laurie Drake had been swept away, and a new Laurie Drake was emerging. Whether she would be as precocious as the old Laurie Drake, whether she would have a predilection for hot fudge sundaes, or would develop an early interest in the opposite sex, or be drawn to horror movies, all as the old Laurie Drake had been, was yet to be seen.
But that evening, while Ryerson Biergarten again made sweet and soul-consuming love to Joan Mott Evans, and Captain Jack Lucas lovingly cleaned his Colt .45, and Gail Newman slept a fitful sleep, and Detective Andy Spurling went on his shift-despite the awful pains in his stomach-and Lilian Janus kept herself locked in her bathroom, and Benny Bloom dreamed of Nurse Scotti, she-the new Laurie Drake-was destined to be one of the lucky ones.
Chapter Sixteen
The Following Morning
Irene Sabitch, in the Records Division of the Buffalo Police Department, asked her coworker Glenn Coffman, "What do you know about Jack Lucas? He's the captain over at the Tenth Precinct."
Coffman glanced briefly at her from his own monitor. "Not a whole lot. I hear he's an asshole, that's about it." He looked at his monitor again.
"Well, if he is, he's got good reason for it." Coffman glanced at her again. "Oh? Why's that?"
She answered simply, "He's dying."
Coffman shrugged. "That's tough. What of?"
"Cancer."
"How do you know?"
She nodded at her monitor. "It's part of the employee records, so I have access to it."
"Limited access, Irene. Those records are confidential-"
"I know that. I wasn't snooping. Too much, anyway. I was only trying to open that damned set of files, and his name came up, so-"
"How'd his name come up?"
"It was in the news articles about that murder/suicide in Erie. You remember, Lila Curtis-"
"So that's her name. Lila." He grinned. "I was pretty close. I said Lily, didn't I?"
"Yes, you did, congratulations. Anyway, Lucas was down there, in Erie, at the time. Apparently the Erie police chief is a close friend of his and since he was there, anyway, he asked him to help."
Coffman eyed her silently for several seconds. Then he said, "And you think that screwy user number is his-Lucas's?"
"I'm almost positive of it."
Coffman sighed. "Well, for God's sake, Irene, you've got a list of user numbers there; why don't you just find his-"
"I did that, and it didn't work."
"Well then, what you do is, you call up this Captain Lucas and you tell him, 'Captain Lucas, I have a disk here that I believe has your user number on it, but the user number on file doesn't work. Was it changed? Did you change it?' "
She nodded. "I did that, too. He says he doesn't know a damn thing about it-and those were his words exactly. He even ordered me to stop looking into the whole thing."
"Why in hell would he do that if he doesn't know anything about it? It doesn't make sense."
"You're very good at stating the obvious, Glen."
"Uh-huh. So what did you tell him?"
"I told him okay, I'd close down the file, I'd erase it."
"And he believed you?"
"I don't think so. When I got to work this morning, the disk was missing."
"My God-"
She smiled, pleased with herself. "Good thing I took the precaution of making a copy."
~ * ~
At the Tenth Precinct
"Well, where is he then?" Ryerson asked the desk sergeant.
"Listen," the sergeant answered, "all I know is that Captain Lucas left the building at nine-thirty this morning. He didn't tell me where he was going and I didn't ask."
Ryerson shifted Creosote from one arm to the other; Creosote had his soft plastic duck between his teeth and as Ryerson shifted him, the dog growled as if annoyed.
"That's some dog," the desk sergeant quipped.
Ryerson ignored the remark. "Could you tell Captain Lucas that I was here?"
"And you are?"
"My name's Ryerson Biergarten."
The desk sergeant wrote it on a memo pad. "You're that psychic, right?"
Again Ryerson ignored him. "Is there a place called Frank's in Buffalo?"
"Frank's?" said the desk sergeant, turned, and called to a couple of uniformed cops behind him, "Hey, any you guys heard of a place called Frank's?"
One of the cops answered, "You mean Frank's Place? Yeah. It's on Eddy Street."
The desk sergeant turned back to Ryerson. "You got that?"
"I got it," Ryerson said.
"You know where Eddy Street is?"
"No," Ryerson answered, "but I have a map."
The sergeant grinned. "I thought you were psychic." A brief pause. "The hell with the map. What you do is, you go back out to the street, you turn left, you go five blocks, you make another left-" He paused, glanced back at the uniformed cops. "Hey, is Eddy Street north or south of Minerva?"
The same cop answered, "Minerva? Where's that?"
And Ryerson said, "Thanks, anyway. I'll stick with the map."
"Suit yourself," the desk sergeant said. And as Ryerson turned to go, he called, "You ain't gonna like it down there, believe me."
~ *~
The image of a blue sky littered with dark gray smudges was with Ryerson almost constantly now, though he tried hard to put it aside. The blue was still soft, pale, and pretty, but the smudges moved and pulsated as if they were alive. There were perhaps half a dozen of them, Ryerson thought. He wasn't sure of the number because each time he tried to study them-much as he'd study a painting or a photograph-they shifted crazily, like snakes squirming off, and he found that his view of them was always oblique.
His guess was that each of the dark gray smudges represented, as he'd told Captain Lucas the day before, "an entity."
"An entity?" Lucas had said then, his voice dripping with incredulity. "What sort of entity, Mr. Biergarten?"