Black House (34 page)

Just as the crowd begins chanting, “HELL NO, WE WON’T GO! HELL NO, WE WON’T GO!” Holtz and Nestler return to bolster the line.
Hell no, we won’t go?
Danny wonders.
Isn’t that supposed to be about Vietnam?

Only dimly aware of the sound of a police siren, Danny sees Mouse wade into the crowd and knock out the first three people he can reach. Doc settles his hands on the open window of an all-too-familiar Oldsmobile and asks the small, balding driver what the hell he thinks he is doing. “Doc, leave him alone,” Danny says, but the siren whoops again and drowns out his words.

Although the little man at the wheel of the Olds looks like an ineffectual math teacher or a low-level civic functionary, he possesses the determination of a gladiator. He is the Reverend Lance Hovdahl, Danny’s old Sunday school teacher.

“I thought I could help,” the reverend says.

“What with all this racket, I can’t really hear you too good. Let me help you get closer,” Doc says. He reaches in through the window as the siren whoops again and a State Police car slides by on the other side.

“Hold it, Doc, STOP!” Danny shouts, seeing the two men in the state car, Brown and Black, craning their necks to stare at the spectacle of a bearded man built like a grizzly bear dragging a Lutheran minister out through the window of his car. Creeping along behind them, another surprise, is Arnold Hrabowski, the Mad Hungarian, goggling through the windshield of his DAREmobile as if terrified by the chaos around him.

The end of the lane is like a war zone now. Danny strides into the screaming mob and shoves a few people aside on his way to Doc and his old Sunday school teacher, who looks shaken but not at all injured. “Well, Danny, my
goodness,
” the minister says. “I’m certainly glad to see you here.”

Doc glares at the two of them. “You know each other?”

“Reverend Hovdahl, this is Doc,” Danny says. “Doc, this is Reverend Hovdahl, the pastor at Mount Hebron Lutheran.”

“Holy moly,” says Doc, and immediately begins to pat the little man’s lapels and tug at the hem of his jacket, as if to pull him into shape. “Sorry, Reverend, I hope I didn’t hurt you none.”

The state cops and the Mad Hungarian manage at last to squeeze out of the crowd. The sound level decreases to a mild hubbub—one way or another, Doc’s friends have silenced the loudest members of the opposition.

“Fortunately, the window is wider than I am,” the reverend says.

“Say, maybe I could come over and talk to you someday,” says Doc. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about first-century Christianity lately. You know, Géza Vermès, John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen, stuff like that. I’d like to bounce some ideas off you.”

Whatever Reverend Hovdahl intends to say is obliterated by the sudden explosion of noise from the other end of the lane. A woman’s voice rises like a banshee’s, in an inhuman screeching that shivers the hairs on the nape of Danny’s neck. It sounds to him as though escaped lunatics a thousand times more dangerous than the Thunder Five are raving through the landscape. What the devil could have
happened
up there?

“ ‘Hello boys’?” Unable to contain his indignation, Bobby Dulac turns to stare first at Dale, then at Jack. His voice rises, hardens. “Is this shit for real?
‘Hello boys’
?
”

Dale coughs into his fist and shrugs. “He wanted us to find her.”

“Well, of course,” Jack says. “He told us to come here.”

“Why would he do that, though?” Bobby asks.

“He’s proud of his work.” From some dim crossroads in Jack’s memory, an ugly voice says,
Stay out of it. You mess with me and I’ll strew your guts from Racine to La Riviere.
Whose voice had that been? With no more evidence than his conviction, Jack understands that if he could place that voice, he would put a name to the Fisherman. He cannot; all Jack Sawyer can do at this moment is remember a stink worse than the foul cloud that fills this crumbling building—a hideous smell that came from the southwest of another world. That was the Fisherman, too, or whatever the Fisherman was in that world.

A thought worthy of the former rising star of the LAPD’s Homicide Division awakens in his mind, and he says, “Dale, I think you should let Henry hear that 911 tape.”

“I don’t get it. What for?”

“Henry’s tuned in to stuff even bats can’t hear. Even if he doesn’t recognize the voice, he’ll learn a hundred times more than what we know now.”

“Well, Uncle Henry never forgets a voice, that’s true. Okay, let’s get out of here. The M.E. and the evidence wagon should show up in a couple of minutes.”

Trailing behind the other two men, Jack thinks of Tyler Marshall’s Brewers cap and where he found it—that world he has spent more than half his life denying, and his return to which this morning continues to send shocks through his system. The Fisherman left the cap for him in the Territories, the land he had first heard of when Jacky was six—when Jacky was six, and Daddy played the horn. It is all coming back to him, that immense adventure, not because he wishes it, but because it
has to
come back: forces outside himself are picking him up by the scruff of his neck and carrying him forward. Forward into his own past! The Fisherman is proud of his handiwork, yes, the Fisherman is deliberately taunting them—a truth so obvious none of the three men had to speak it aloud—but really the Fisherman is baiting only Jack Sawyer, who alone has seen the Territories. And if
that’s
true, as it has to be, then—

—then the Territories and all they contain are involved somehow in these wretched crimes, and he has been thrust into a drama of enormous consequence he cannot possibly grasp right now. The Tower. The Beam. He had seen this in his mother’s handwriting, something about the Tower falling and the Beams breaking: these things are parts of the puzzle, whatever they mean, as is Jack’s gut conviction that Tyler Marshall is still alive, tucked away in some pocket of the other world. The recognition that he can never speak of all this to anyone else, not even Henry Leyden, makes him feel intensely alone.

Jack’s thoughts blow away in the noisy chaos that erupts alongside and in front of the shack. It sounds like an Indian attack in a cowboy movie, whooping and yelling and the sound of running feet. A woman sends up a shrill scream eerily like the
blip-blip
s of the police siren he had half-noted a few moments ago. Dale mutters “Jeez,” and breaks into a run, followed by Bobby and Jack.

Outside, what appears to be a half dozen crazy people are racing around in the weedy gravel in front of Ed’s. Dit Jesperson and Beezer, still too stunned to react, watch them caper back and forth. The crazy people make an amazing amount of noise. One man yells, “KILL THE FISHERMAN! KILL THE DIRTY BASTARD!” Another is shouting “LAW ’N’ ORDER ’N’ FREE BEER!” A scrawny character in bib overalls picks up “FREE BEER! WE WANT FREE BEER!” A harpy too old for her tank top and blue jeans skitters around waving her arms and screeching at the top of her lungs. The grins on their faces indicate that these people are engaged in some dimwitted prank. They are having the time of their lives.

Up from the end of the lane comes a State Police car, with the Mad Hungarian’s DARE Pontiac right behind it. In the middle of the chaos, Henry Leyden tilts his head and smiles to himself.

When he sees his chief take off after one of the men, fat Dit Jesperson lurches into action and spots Doodles Sanger, against whom he has borne a grudge ever since she turned him down late one night in the Nelson Hotel. Dit recognizes Teddy Runkleman, the tall galoot with the broken nose Dale is chasing; and he knows Freddy Saknessum, but Freddy is undoubtedly too fast for him and, besides, Dit has the feeling that if he put his hands on Freddy Saknessum, about eight hours later he would probably come down with something really nasty. Bobby Dulac is on the skinny guy’s case, so Doodles is Dit’s target, and he looks forward to pulling her down into the weeds and making her pay for calling him what she did, six years ago in the Nelson’s filthy bar. (In front of maybe a dozen of French Landing’s most raffish characters, Doodles had compared him to the then chief’s smelly, waddling old mongrel, Tubby.)

Dit looks her in the eye, and for a second she stops jumping around to stand flat-footed on the ground and give him a little come-hither gesture with the fingers of both hands. He launches himself at her, but when he gets to where she was, she is six feet off to the right, shifting on her feet like a basketball player. “Tubby-Tubby,” she says. “Come and get it, Tub-Tub.” Furious, Dit reaches, misses, and nearly loses his balance. Doodles prances away laughing and mouths the hateful expression. Dit doesn’t get it—why doesn’t Doodles just break away and take off? It’s like she almost wants to get caught, but first she has to run out the clock.

After another serious lunge that misses the target by only an inch or two, Dit Jesperson wipes the sweat off his face and checks out the scene. Bobby Dulac is snapping cuffs on the skinny guy, but Dale and Hollywood Sawyer are faring only a little better than he is. Teddy Runkleman and Freddy Saknessum dodge and bob away from their pursuers, both of them cackling like idiots and shouting their halfwit slogans. Why is low-life scum always so agile? Dit supposes that rodents like Runkleman and Saknessum get more practice in being light on their feet than regular people.

He charges Doodles, who slips past him and goes into a chuckling, high-stepping diddley-bop. Over her shoulder, Dit sees Hollywood finally fake out Saknessum, wrap an arm around his waist, and throw him to the ground.

“You didn’t have to get all physical on my ass,” Saknessum says. His eyes shift, and he gives a brief nod. “Hey, Runks.”

Teddy Runkleman glances at him, and his eyes shift, too. He stops moving. The chief says, “What, you run out of gas?”

“Party’s over,” Runkleman says. “Hey, we were just funnin’, you know?”

“Aw, Runksie, I wanna play some more,” Doodles says, throwing a few hip wiggles into the diddley-bop. In a flash, Beezer St. Pierre thrusts his mountainous self between her and Dit. He steps forward, rumbling like a semi going up a steep grade. Doodles tries to dance backward, but Beezer envelops her and carries her toward the chief.

“Beezie, don’cha love me no more?” Doodles asks.

Beezer grunts in disgust and deposits her in front of the chief. The two state cops, Perry Brown and Jeff Black, are hanging back, looking even more disgusted than the biker. If Dit’s mental processes were to be transcribed from their shorthand into standard English, the result would be,
He’s gotta have something on the ball if he brews that Kingsland Ale, because that is some fine, fine beer. And look at the chief! He’s so ready to bust a gut, he can’t even see that we’re about to lose this case.

“You were FUNNIN’?” the chief roars. “What’s the MATTER with you idiots? Don’t you have any respect for that poor girl in there?”

As the state cops step forward to take charge, Dit sees Beezer go rigid with shock for a moment, then move as inconspicuously as possible away from the group. No one but Dit Jesperson pays any attention to him—the enormous biker has done his bit, and now his part is over. Arnold Hrabowski, who had been more or less concealed behind Brown and Black, shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders, and gives Dit a glance of shamefaced apology. Dit doesn’t get it: What does the Mad Hungarian have to feel so guilty about? Hell, he just
got
here. Dit looks back at Beezer, who is advancing ponderously toward the side of the shack and—surprise, surprise!—everybody’s best pal and favorite reporter, Mr. Wendell Green, now appearing a little alarmed.
Guess more than one kind of scum just rose to the surface,
Dit thinks.

Beezer likes women who are smart and levelheaded, like Bear Girl; brainless skanks like Doodles drive him crazy. He reaches out, grabs two handfuls of pasty, rayon-covered flesh, and scoops wriggling Doodles under his arm.

Doodles says, “Beezie, don’cha love me no more?”

He lowers the dumb mutt to the ground in front of Dale Gilbertson. When Dale finally explodes at these four grown-up juvenile delinquents, Beezer remembers the signal Freddy had given Runksie, and looks over the chief’s shoulder at the front of the old store. To the left of the rotting gray entrance, Wendell Green is aiming his camera at the group before him, getting fancy, bending and leaning, stepping to one side and another as he snaps pictures. When he sees Beezer looking at him through his lens, Wendell straightens up and lowers his camera. He has an awkward little smile on his face.

Green must have slithered in through the back way, Beezer imagines, because there’s no way the cops down front would give him a pass. Come to think of it, Doodles and the Dodos must have come the same way. He hopes all of them did not learn of the back road by following him, but that’s a possibility.

The reporter lets his camera hang from its strap and, keeping his eyes on Beezer, sidles away from the old shanty. The guilty, frightened way he moves reminds Beezer of a hyena’s slink toward its carrion. Wendell Green does fear Beezer, and Beezer cannot blame him. Green is lucky that Beezer did not actually rip off his head, instead of merely talking about it. Yet . . . Green’s hyenalike crawl strikes Beezer as pretty strange, under the circumstances. He can’t be afraid of getting beaten up in front of all these cops, can he?

Green’s uneasiness forms a link in Beezer’s mind to the communication he had seen pass between Runkleman and Freddy. When their eyes shifted, when they looked away, they were looking at the reporter!
He had set the whole thing up in advance.
Green was using the Dodos as a distraction from whatever he was doing with his camera, of course. Such total sleaziness, such moral ugliness, infuriates Beezer. Galvanized by loathing, he moves quietly away from Dale and the other policemen and walks toward Wendell Green, keeping his eyes locked on the reporter’s.

He sees Wendell consider making a break for it, then reject the idea, most likely because he knows he doesn’t have a chance of getting away.

When Beezer comes to within ten feet of him, Green says, “We don’t need any trouble here, Mr. St. Pierre. I’m just doing my job. Surely you can understand that.”