He tried not to smell the blood. Took long deep breaths. Made himself open his eyes to look at the dead body. He figured looking at it the second time wouldn’t be as bad as the first. He knew it was going to be there this time, so it wouldn’t be such a big surprise.
The surprise was—the body was gone.
Thomas closed his eyes, put one hand to his face, looked again between spread fingers. The body still wasn’t there.
He started shaking because what he thought, first, was that this was like some other TV stories he’d seen where nasty-dead bodies were walking around like live bodies, rotting and getting wormy, with bones showing in places, killing people for no reason and even sometimes eating them. He could never watch much of one of those stories. He sure didn’t want to be in one.
He was so scared he almost TVed to Bobby—Dead people, look out, look out, dead people hungry and mean and walking around—but stopped himself when he saw there wasn’t blood on Derek’s blankets and sheets. The bed wasn’t rumpled, either. Neatly made. No walking dead person was quick enough to get out of bed, change sheets and blankets, make everything right just in the few little seconds while Thomas’s eyes were closed. Then he heard the shower pouring down on the floor of the stall in the bathroom, and he heard Derek singing soft the way he always did when he washed himself. For just a moment, in his head, Thomas had a picture of a dead person taking a shower, trying to be neat, but rotten chunks were falling off with the dirt, showing more bones, clogging the drain. Then he realized Derek was never really dead. Thomas hadn’t really seen a body on the bed. What he’d seen was something else he’d learned from TV stories—he’d seen a vision. A sidekick vision. He was a sidekick.
Derek hadn’t been killed. What Thomas saw, just for a moment, was Derek being dead tomorrow or some other day after tomorrow. It might be something that would happen no matter what Thomas did to stop it, or it might be something that would happen only if he let it happen, but at least it wasn’t something that already happened.
He let go of the footboard and went to his worktable. His legs were shaky. He was glad to sit down. He opened the top drawer of the cabinet that stood beside the table. He saw his scissors in there, where they should be, with his colored pencils and pens and paper clips and Scotch tape and stapler—and a half-eaten Hershey’s bar in an open wrapper, which shouldn’t be in there because it would Draw Bugs. He took the candy out of the drawer and stuffed it in a pocket of his robe, reminding himself to put it in the refrigerator later.
For a while he stared at the scissors, listened to Derek sing in the shower, and thought how the scissors were jammed in Derek’s belly, letting all the music and other sounds out of him forever, sending him to the Bad Place. Finally he touched the black plastic handles. They felt all right, so he touched the metal blades, but that was bad, real bad, as if leftover lightning from a storm was in the blades and jumped into him when he touched them. Sizzling, crackling white light flashed through him. He snatched his hand back. His fingers tingled. He closed the drawer and hurried back to bed and sat there with the covers pulled around his shoulders the way TV Indians wrapped themselves in blankets when they sat at TV campfires.
The shower stopped. So did the singing. After a while Derek came out of the bathroom, followed by a cloud of damp, soapy-smelling air. He was dressed for the day. His wet hair was combed back from his forehead.
He was not a rotting dead person. He was all alive, every part of him, at least every part you could see, and no bones poked out anywhere.
“Good morning,” Derek said, the words slurred and muffled by his crooked mouth and too-big tongue. He smiled.
“Good morning.”
“You sleep good?”
“Yeah,” Thomas said.
“Breakfast soon.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe sticky buns.”
“Maybe.”
“I like sticky buns.”
“Derek?”
“Huh?”
“If I ever tell you ...”
Derek waited, smiling.
Thomas thought out what he wanted to say, then continued: “If I ever tell you the Bad Thing’s coming, and I tell you to run, don’t just stand around like a dumb person. You just run. ”
Derek stared at him, thinking about it, still smiling, then after a while he said, “Sure, okay.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. But what’s a bad thing?”
“I don’t know really, for sure, but I’ll feel when it’s coming, I think, and tell you, and you’ll run.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Down the hall. Find some aides, stay with them.”
“Sure. You better wash. Breakfast soon. Maybe sticky buns.”
Thomas unwrapped himself from the blanket and got out of bed. He stepped into his slippers again and walked to the bathroom.
Just as Thomas was opening the bathroom door, Derek said, “You mean at breakfast?”
Thomas turned. “Huh?”
“You mean a bad thing might come at breakfast?”
“Might,” Thomas said.
“Could it be ... poached eggs?”
“Huh?”
“The bad thing—could it be poached eggs? I don’t like poached eggs, all slimy, yuck, that’d be real bad, not good at all like cereal and bananas and sticky buns.”
“No, no,” Thomas said. “The bad thing isn’t poached eggs. It’s a person, some funny-weird person. I’ll feel when it’s coming, and tell you, and you’ll run.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. A person.”
Thomas went into the bathroom, closed the door. He didn’t have much beard. He had an electric razor, but he only used it a couple-few times a month, and today he didn’t need it. He brushed his teeth, though. And he peed. He made the water start in the shower. Only then did he let himself laugh, because enough time had passed so Derek wouldn’t even wonder if Thomas was laughing at him.
Poached eggs!
Though Thomas usually didn’t like seeing himself, seeing how lumpy and wrong and dumb his face was, he peeked at the steam-streaked mirror. One time long ago, past when he could remember, he’d been laughing when he’d happened to see himself in a mirror, and for once—surprise!—he hadn’t felt so bad about how he looked. When he laughed he looked more like a normal person. Just pretending to laugh didn’t make him look more normal, it had to be real laughing, and smiling didn’t do it, either, because a smile wasn’t enough of a laugh to change his face. In fact, a smile could sometimes look so sad, he couldn’t stand seeing himself at all.
Poached eggs.
Thomas shook his head, and when his laughter finished he turned from the mirror.
To Derek the most worst bad thing he could think of was poached eggs and no sticky buns, which was very funny ha-ha. You try to tell Derek about walking dead people and scissors sticking out of bellies and something that eats little live animals, and old Derek would look at you and smile and nod and not get it at all.
For as long as he could remember, Thomas had wished he was a normal person, not dumb, and many times he thanked God for at least making him not as dumb as poor Derek. But now he half wished he was dumber, so he could get those ugly-nasty vision-pictures out of his mind, so he could forget about Derek going to die and the Bad Thing coming and Julie being in danger, so he’d have nothing to worry about except poached eggs, which wouldn’t be much of a worry at all, since he sort of liked poached eggs.
41
WHEN CLINT Karaghiosis arrived at Dakota & Dakota shortly before nine o’clock, Bobby took him by the shoulder, turned him around, and went back to the elevators with him. “You drive, and I’ll fill you in on what’s happened during the night. I know you’ve got other cases to tend to, but the Pollard thing is getting hotter by the minute.”
“Where’re we going?”
“First, Palomar Labs. They called. Test results are ready.”
Only a few clouds remained in the sky, and they were all far off toward the mountains, moving away like the billowing sails of great galleons on an eastward journey. It was a quintessential southern California day: blue, pleasantly warm, everything green and fresh, and rush-hour traffic so hideously snarled that it could transform an ordinary citizen into a foaming-at-the-mouth sociopath with a yearning to pull the trigger of a semiautomatic weapon.
Clint avoided freeways, but even surface streets were clogged. By the time Bobby recounted everything that had transpired since they had seen each other yesterday afternoon, they were still ten minutes from Palomar in spite of the questions occasioned by Clint’s amazement-subdued like all of his reactions, but amazement nonetheless-over the discovery that Frank was evidently able to teleport himself.
Finally Bobby changed the subject because talking too much about psychic phenomena to a phlegmatic guy like Clint made him feel like an airhead, as if he had lost his grip on reality. While they inched along Bristol Avenue, he said, “I can remember when you could go anywhere in Orange County and never get caught in traffic.”
“Not so long ago.”
“I remember when you didn’t have to sign a developer’s waiting list to buy a house. Demand wasn’t five times supply.”
“Yeah.”
“And I remember when orange groves were all over Orange County.”
“Me too.”
Bobby sighed. “Hell, listen to me, like an old geezer, babbling about the good old days. Pretty soon, I’ll be talking about how nice it was when there were still dinosaurs around.”
“Dreams,” Clint said. “Everyone’s got a dream, and the one more people have than any other is the California dream, so they never stop coming, even though so many have come now that the dream isn’t really quite attainable any more, not the original dream that started it all. Of course, maybe a dream should be unattainable, or at least at the outer limits of your reach. If it’s too easy, it’s meaningless.”
Bobby was surprised by the long burst of words from Clint, but more surprised to hear the man talking about something as intangible as dreams. “You’re already a Californian, so what’s your dream?”
After a brief hesitation, Clint said, “That Felina will be able to hear someday. There’re so many medical advancements these days, new discoveries and treatments and techniques all the time.”
As Clint turned left off Bristol, onto the side street where Palomar Laboratories stood, Bobby decided that was a good dream, a damned fine dream, maybe even better than his and Julie’s dream about buying time and getting a chance to bring Thomas out of Cielo Vista and into a remade family.
They parked in the lot beside the huge concrete-block building in which Palomar Laboratories was housed. As they were walking toward the front door, Clint said, “Oh, by the way, the receptionist here thinks I’m gay, which is fine with me.”
“What?”
Clint went inside without saying more, and Bobby followed him to the reception window. An attractive blonde sat at the counter.
“Hi, Lisa,” Clint said.
“Hi!” She punctuated her response by cracking her chewing gum.
“Dakota and Dakota,”
“I remember,” she said. “Your stuff’s ready. I’ll get it.”
She glanced at Bobby and smiled, and he smiled, too, though her expression seemed a little peculiar to him.
When she returned with two large, sealed manila envelopes-one labeled SAMPLES, the other ANALYSES—Clint handed the second one to Bobby. They stepped to one side of the lounge, away from the counter.
Bobby tore open the envelope and skimmed the documents inside. “Cat’s blood.”
“You serious?”
“Yeah. When Frank woke up in that motel, he was covered with cat’s blood.”
“I knew he was no killer.”
Bobby said, “The cat may have an opinion about that.”
“The other stuff is?”
“Well... bunch of technical terms here ... but what it comes down to is that it’s what it looks like. Black sand.”
Stepping back to the reception counter, Clint said, “Lisa, you remember we talked about a black-sand beach in Hawaii?”
“Kaimu,” she said. “It’s a dyn**ite place.”
“Yeah, Kaimu. Is it the only one?”
“Black-sand beach, you mean? No. There’s Punaluu, which is a real sweet place too. Those are on the big island. I guess there must be more on the other islands, ’cause there’s volcanoes all over the place, aren’t there?”
Bobby joined them at the counter. “What do volcanoes have to do with it?”
Lisa took her chewing gum out of her mouth and put it aside on a piece of paper. “Well, the way I heard it, really hot lava flows into the sea, and when it meets the water, there’re these huge explosions, which throw off zillions and zillions of these really teeny-tiny beads of black glass, and then over a long period of time the waves rub all the beads together until they’re ground down into sand.”
“They have these beaches anywhere but Hawaii?” Bobby wondered.
She shrugged. “Probably. Clint, is this fella your... friend?”
“Yeah,” Clint said.
“I mean, you know, your good friend?”
“Yeah,” Clint said, without looking at Bobby.
Lisa winked at Bobby. “Listen, you make Clint take you to Kaimu, ’cause I’ll tell you something—it’s really terrific to go out on a black beach at night, make love under the stars, because it’s soft, for one thing, but mainly because black sand doesn’t reflect moonlight like regular sand. It seems like you’re floating in space, darkness all around, it really sharpens your senses, if you know what I mean.”
“Sounds terrific,” Clint said. “Take care, Lisa.” He headed for the door.
As Bobby turned to follow Clint, Lisa said, “You make him take you to Kaimu, you hear? You’ll have a good time.”
Outside, Bobby said, “Clint, you’ve got some explaining to do.”
“Didn’t you hear her? These little beads of black glass—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Hey, look at you, you’re grinning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you grinning. I don’t think I like you grinning.”
42
BY NINE o’clock, Lee Chen had arrived at the offices, opened a bottle of orange-flavored seltzer, and settled in the computer room midst his beloved hardware, where Julie was waiting for him. He was five six, slender but wiry, with a warm brass complexion and jet-black hair that bristled in a modified punk style. He wore red tennis shoes and socks, baggy black cotton pants with a white belt, a black and charcoal-gray shirt with a subtle leaf pattern, and a black jacket with narrow lapels and big shoulder pads. He was the most stylishly dressed employee at Dakota & Dakota, even compared to Cassie Hanley, their receptionist, who was an unashamed clotheshorse.