'Careful, man,' his partner said. 'You screw up the scene and they'll pull your asshole out and wear it like a ring.'
'I know, I know,' he said.
Still he leaned in a little closer. This was as far as he was going to go, for sure. He tilted his head slightly, to reduce the glint. The smell was odd. The sight was bad. It was unpleasant all over.
In the mess that had been her forehead, something looked out of place.
He held his breath and moved forward another few inches. From here you couldn't avoid seeing the ants and other insects going about their duties, hurriedly, as if they knew someone was going to come and take this treasure away from them. You could also see that there was something stuck in the woman's forehead. The protruding edge was the width of a playing card, though it was much thicker — a quarter-inch, maybe slightly more. The glint came off the parts of this thing which weren't covered in dried blood. It seemed to be mainly made out of chrome, or some other kind of shiny metal. The lower edge of it looked to be black plastic.
Suddenly some of the remaining glare disappeared, as his partner leaned in to have a look and blocked out the sun. As a result the policeman could just make out something that looked like a very narrow label running along the end of the object.
'Fuck is that?' he said.
— «» — «» — «»—
By a little after nine it had been established that the thing sticking out of the woman's forehead was a hard disk, a small one, the kind found in laptop computers. It wasn't long before this information reached the FBI field office in Everett, and then quickly down to Los Angeles. From there, everything went batshit.
Charles Monroe tried every number he had, but Nina Baynam wasn't answering. He kept trying anyway, at regular intervals. Something had gone wrong with Monroe's life in a way he didn't quite understand, and it was getting more and more wrong by the minute. He had looked away, lost concentration for just one second, and turned back to find his ducks were no longer in a row.
His ducks had always been in a row before. Not now. It was even beginning to look as if some of them were missing.
20
Henrickson switched the engine off and turned to Tom with a grin. It was, Tom estimated, approximately the man's fifteenth of the morning, and it was as yet only ten o'clock.
'You ready for this?'
Tom gripped the backpack on his lap. 'I guess so.'
Forty-eight hours had now passed since he came back to Sheffer. The previous morning he'd woken from a night's non-sleep to find he felt too ill to consider a walk in the woods that day. Whatever adrenaline had hauled him back to Sheffer had burned out, leaving him exhausted, in many kinds of pain, and deeply nauseous. He also realized he had to do some proper thinking.
Henrickson had been cool about the delay, and told him to rest up. This Tom had done, initially, sitting in the chair in his room wrapped up in all the bedding he could find; getting stuff straight in his head, working out things he could do. In the early afternoon he had gone for a long drive, coming back after dark. By then he'd felt well enough to go for another drink with the journalist. This morning he'd felt better, if not exactly on top form. Calmer, perhaps. More compartmentalized.
Pulling in to the lot at the head of the Howard's Point trail provoked a far stronger reaction than he anticipated. If returning to his nest down in the gully had made him feel like a spirit coming home, stepping out of Henrickson's Lexus made him feel like his own grandfather. The journalist had parked on the opposite side of the lot to where Tom had come to rest — and fallen, for the first time — but that somehow made the layering effect even more unsettling. When the clunk of his car door closing echoed tightly off the trees, the view seemed to have a shivery fragility, as if it had been quickly painted over some other scene. Some emotional charge had changed. Of course the last time he'd been here he'd been drunk, whereas now he was merely slightly hungover, and feeling a bit sick, and there was a lot more snow than before.
'Jim, you know it's going to be very hard to find the place.'
'Of course.' The reporter had ditched his suit and was wearing an old pair of jeans and a tough-looking jacket. His boots spoke of proper walking experience. He looked hale and fit and altogether more prepared than Tom felt. 'You were out of it, and it was nearly dark. Not the end of the world if you don't find the same exact spot. Just… it would be good if you could.'
'Can't you just tell me what we're looking for?'
Grin number sixteen. 'Don't you like a surprise?'
'Not so much.'
'Trust me. It'll be great for the book. 'Kozelek leads the way back to the spot that changes history and biology and what the hell else as we know it. His fearless scribe points out the final proof. They share a manly hug.' It's a buddy thing. Hug's optional, of course.'
Tom nodded, wishing not for the first time that he hadn't mentioned the idea of writing a book. Henrickson had claimed not to be trying to get him drunk, again, and he believed him: yet by the end of the second evening Tom had spilled pretty much everything there was to know about himself. Pretty much.
'I just don't want to get lost again.'
'We won't. I've done hiking. I have a compass and I know how to use it. And if you didn't have a serious sense of direction, you'd be dead now.'
'I guess so.'
Tom swivelled his ankle gently. It still hurt, but the new boots seemed to help. He shrugged the backpack on. This time it held bottled water and a flask of sweet coffee and a couple of flapjacks. There was probably still glass at the bottom, too, but that was okay. He brought it along because it was from before. The glass was from before too. He had an idea that he might try to dump the bag in the forest somewhere, to try to leave behind everything it represented.
He walked over into the top corner, hesitated a moment, and then stepped over the thick log that formed a boundary to the parking area.
Henrickson waited until the man had made it a few yards up the trail, and then turned to look back across the lot. For just a moment he'd felt something in the back of his neck, almost as if he was being watched. He panned his eyes slowly around, but couldn't see anyone. Strange. He was usually right about that kind of thing.
He looked back to see Kozelek had stopped. Now that he was started, the man's enthusiasm for the trip was growing fast, as he had known it would.
'It's this way.'
Henrickson stepped over the log and followed him into the forest.
— «» — «» — «»—
Though there was a bank of cloud over to the west, the sun was strong and bright. It cast attractive shadows in the undisturbed snow. The two men walked for a while, climbing slowly, without saying much. By this time the road was a good distance behind them, and there was no noise but for the sound of their breath and feet.
'You seem pretty confident, my friend. You remember coming up this way?'
'Not remember. Just… I recognize the shape. Sounds stupid, maybe, and I'm really not much of an outdoors person, but…'
He stopped, and indicated the layout of the trees and hillside around them. 'Which other way are you going to go?'
Henrickson nodded. 'Know what you're saying, Tom. Some people, they got no sense of direction at all. Like some kid's wind-up toy. Let them go, and they walk in a straight line until they hit a wall. Others, they feel. They just know where they are. Works with time, too, matter of fact. What time do you think it is? Take a second. Think about it. Actually, don't: feel it instead. What time does it feel like?'
Tom considered. It didn't feel like any time at all, but it was probably about a half-hour since they'd started out.
'Half past ten.'
The man shook his head. 'Closer to eleven. About five to, I'd say.' He stretched his wrist out of his jacket and looked at his watch. A grin, and then he held it out to Tom. 'How about that. Four minutes to.'