Lem explained that, since Travis Cornell was an ex-Delta man with considerable combat skills, he ought to be handled with care. “If we go storming in there, he’ll know who we are as soon as he sees us coming, and he might react violently. If I go in alone, I’ll be able to get him to talk to me, and maybe I can persuade him to just give it up.”
That was a flimsy explanation for his unorthodox procedure, and it did not wipe the frown off Cliff’s face.
Lem didn’t care about Cliff’s frown. He went in alone, driving one of the sedans, and parked in front of the bleached-wood house.
Birds were singing in the trees. Winter had temporarily relaxed its hold on the northern California coast, and the day was warm.
Lem climbed the steps and knocked on the front door.
Travis Cornell answered the knock and stared at him through the screen door before saying, “Mr. Johnson, I suppose.”
“How did you… oh yes, of course, Garrison Dilworth would have told you about me that night he got his call through.”
To Lem’s surprise, Cornell opened the screen door. “You might as well come in.”
Cornell was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, apparently because of a sizable bandage encasing most of his right shoulder. He led Lem through the front room and into a kitchen, where his wife sat at the table, peeling apples for a pie.
“Mr. Johnson,” she said.
Lem smiled and said, “I’m widely known, I see.”
Cornell sat at the table and lifted a cup of coffee. He offered no coffee to Lem.
Standing awkwardly for a moment, Lem eventually sat with them. He said, “Welt, it was inevitable, you know. We had to catch up with you sooner or later.”
She peeled apples and said nothing. Her husband stared into his coffee.
What’s wrong with them? Lem wondered.
This was not remotely like any scenario he had imagined. He was prepared for panic, anger, despondency, and many other things, but not for this strange apathy. They did not seem to care that he had at last tracked them down.
He said, “Aren’t you interested in how we located you?”
The woman shook her head.
Cornell said, “If you really want to tell us, go ahead and have your fun.”
Frowning, puzzled, Lem said, “Well, it was simple. We knew that Mr. Dilworth had to’ve called you from some house or business within a few blocks of that park north of the harbor. So we tied our own computers into the telephone company’s records-with their permission, of course-and put men to work examining all the long-distance calls charged to all the numbers within three blocks of that park, on that one night. Nothing led us to you. But then we realized that, when charges are reversed, the call isn’t billed to the number from which the call is placed; it appears on the records of the person who accepts the reversed charges-which was you. But it also appears in a special phone-company file so they’ll be able to document the call if the person who accepted the charges later refuses to pay. We went through that special file, which is very small, and quickly found a call placed from a house along the coast, just north of the beach park, to your number here. When we went around to talk to the people there-the Essenby family-we focused on their son, a teenager named Tommy, and although it took some time, we ascertained that it had, indeed, been Dilworth who used their phone. The first part was terribly time-consuming, weeks and weeks, but after that… child’s play.”
“Do you want a medal or what?” Cornell asked.
The woman picked up another apple, quartered it, and began to strip off the peel.
They were not making this easy for him-but then his intentions were much different from what they would be expecting. They could not be criticized for being cool toward him when they did not yet know that he had come as a friend.
He said, “Listen, I’ve left my men at the end of the lane. Told them you might panic, do something stupid, if you saw us coming in a group. But why I really came alone was… to make you an offer.”
They both met his eyes at last, with interest.
He said, “I’m getting out of this goddamn job by spring. Why I’m getting Out… you don’t have to know or care. Just say that I’ve gone through a sea change. Learned to deal with failure, and now it doesn’t scare me any more.” He sighed and shrugged. “Anyway, the dog doesn’t belong in a cage. I don’t give a good goddamn what they say, what they want-I know what’s right. I know what it’s like being in a cage. I’ve been in one most of my life, Until recently. The dog shouldn’t have to go back to that. What I’m going to Suggest is that you get him out of here now, Mr. Cornell, take him off through the woods, let him somewhere that he’ll be safe, then come back and face the music. Say that the dog ran off a couple of months ago, in some other place, and you think he must be dead by now, or in the hands of people who’re taking good care of him. There’ll still be the problem of The Outsider, which you must know about, but you and I can work up a way to deal with that when it comes. I’ll put men on a surveillance of you, but after a few weeks I’ll pull them, say it’s a lost cause-”
Cornell stood up and stepped to Lem’s chair. With his left hand he grabbed hold of Lem’s shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You’re sixteen days too late, you son of a bitch.”
“What do you mean?”
“The dog is dead. The Outsider killed him, and I killed The Outsider.”
The woman laid down her paring knife and a piece of apple. She put her face in her hands and sat forward in her chair, shoulders hunched, making soft, sad sounds.
“Ah, Jesus,” Lem said.
Cornell let go of him. Embarrassed, depressed, Lem straightened his tie, smoothed the wrinkles out of his shirt. He looked down at his pants-brushed them off.
“Ah, Jesus,” he repeated.
Cornell was willing to lead them to the place in the forest where he had buried The Outsider.
Lem’s men dug it up. The monstrosity was wrapped in plastic, but they didn’t have to unwrap it to know that it was Yarbeck’s creation.
The weather had been cool since the thing had been killed, but it was getting rank.
Cornell would not tell them where the dog was buried. “He never had much of a chance to live in peace,” Cornell said sullenly. “But, by God, he’s going to rest in peace now. No one’s going to put him on an autopsy table and hack him up. No way.”
“In a case where the national security is at stake, you can be forced-”
“Let them,” Cornell said. “If they haul me up before a judge and try to make me tell them where I buried Einstein, I’ll spill the whole story to the press. But if they leave Einstein alone, if they leave me and mine alone, I’ll keep my mouth shut. I don’t intend to go back to Santa Barbara, to pick up as Travis Cornell. I’m Hyatt now, and that’s what I’m going to stay. My old life’s gone forever. There’s no reason to go back. And if the government’s smart, it’ll let me be Hyatt and stay out of my way.”
Lem stared at him a long time. Then: “Yeah, if they’re smart, I think they’ll do just that.”
Later that same day, as Jim Keene was cooking dinner, his phone rang. It was Garrison Dilworth, whom he had never met but had gotten to know during the past week by acting as liaison between the attorney and Travis and Nora. Garrison was calling from a pay phone in Santa Barbara.
“They show up yet?” the attorney asked.
“Early this afternoon,” Jim said. “That Tommy Essenby must be a good kid.”
“Not bad, really. But he didn’t come to see me and warn me out of the goodness of his heart. He’s in rebellion against authority. When they pressured him into admitting that I made the call from his house that night, he resented them. As inevitably as billy goats ram their heads into board fences, Tommy came straight to me.”
“They took away The Outsider.”