Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (26 page)

But she had to make progress. She had to jolt Tommy, or his parasite, off the dime. Provoke a response that would give her
something to go on.

She took a deep breath and drew as much calm from it as she could. Then she sat at the head of the bed next to Tommy. The
arm lay lifeless on the blanket, bandages crossing the upturned palm and disappearing into the sleeve of his robe.

"Tommy, what's this?" She touched the curled fingers gently. He looked down at it, dismayed. "It's my hand," he said immediately.
"My arm." But the question frightened him.

"That's what you've learned to say, isn't it? That's what Dr. Corcoran wants you to say."

"It's my arm! It looks like an arm, what else could it be!" He sidled away from her. Or from
it
—the slack appendage dragged across the blanket after him and for an instant she saw it as he must, a foreign thing pursuing
him, a snake in the bed.

"If you drew a picture of yourself right now, your whole body, what would it look like?"

He glanced back at the doorway as if hoping someone would interrupt. But the nurse had withdrawn again, and the curtained
third bed was silent. He refused to answer.

"If it's not an arm, what is it?" Cree persisted.

"I don't know!"

"Okay, so it's a thing of some kind," Cree said. "An unknown thing, yeah?" She touched the bandaged palm, and then, overcoming
her revulsion of it, picked up the hand and held it in both of her own. The deadweight was surprisingly heavy.

"Hello, thing," she said to it.

Tommy looked at her, wide-eyed and appalled. "You're crazy," he whispered.

"No! I just refuse to be frightened by things I don't understand." She lightly caressed the inert object, then looked directly
into Tommy's face and mustered everything she had to break through to him: "Listen to me, Tommy!" she whispered forcefully.
"I'm a scientist. One thing I've learned is, this is a strange world. Man, I have had one damned hard time with how strange
it is! But you know the way you feel about being here with a sick kid in the next bed, and guys like Dr. Corcoran treating
you like you're retarded, and thinking maybe you're going to be here forever? That feeling of being in a box? Well, just like
you, I refuse to be in that box. Being afraid of stuff like this is a box. A cage.
I won't stay in it.
"

She looked down at the hand again and said with all the calm and cordiality she could muster, "Hello, unknown thing."

Tommy made an expression of surprise, as if her words had penetrated him deeply and painfully. For an instant, he looked as
if he were going to answer, but instead he made a moan, a shockingly deep voice emerging from his round mouth.

He was off balance now, and she sensed the thing in him moving, flushed from its cover. Cree seized the opening: "Who are
you?" she hissed. "What do you want?"
Is that you, Garrett McCarty? Or are you the one from the rocks?

Tommy looked paralyzed with fright. Abruptly, the hand twitched, and it turned to grip her hand, a quick hard clench as sudden
and startling as an electric shock. In reflexive horror, she stood up and flung it away from her. The arm flopped limply back
onto the bed, but for a few seconds the fingers clenched as if groping for her hand again, then curled and rolled like the
legs of a dying spider. Tommy sidled away from it in terror and it dragged after him over the rumpled bedclothes.

Cree cursed herself. She made herself sit again and take the awful thing back, holding the hand gently and cautiously as if
it were a wild animal. But Tommy's look of betrayal showed he wasn't buying it.
No wonder!
she thought. She'd shown him her hypocrisy: how close to the surface her fear and revulsion were, how marginal her own control.
Worse, she had addressed the thing, he now knew how she was thinking of his problem. She'd confirmed what had to be his worst
fears. And she might very well have programmed his future explanations and descriptions.

"That's why," Tommy said tremulously.

"Why what?" Cree managed.

"Why I stabbed it. It did
that.
It's doing it more and more. It scared me."

Oh, man,
Cree thought.
It's so obvious.
They'd all assumed that the entity had made Tommy attack himself, and Cree's only concern had been whether the act suggested
intentional malevolence. But they all had it backward.
Tommy
had done the stabbing, attacking his persecutor in an effort to hurt it or drive it out. The full complexity of what she was
up against struck her for the first time. With the thing progressively taking control, how long could they be sure who was
Tommy and who the invader?

"Mrs. Pierce says it does other things. When I'm asleep." Tommy's rasping whisper sounded like the fear-awed voice of a much
younger child. "Some of it was these ordinary gestures, things you do with your hands when you're talking to somebody or just
sitting around." His voice dropped almost to inaudibility: "But some were like it was trying to figure out where it was. And
some were like . . . it wanted to hurt somebody."

Cree met his round eyes and shared his horror. But they were getting close to something important. If she could frame her
next questions just right, she might learn a great deal.

"Hel-
lo,
people!" The jovial voice startled them both. Cree turned to see Dr. Corcoran padding toward them, stooped like a
white-coated vulture and wearing his biggest smile and best bedside manner. "How's the man of the hour, Mr. Keeday? Making
any progress, Dr. Black?"

Cree wanted to kick him. But Tommy reflexively nodded and mustered a miserable grin for Dr. Corcoran. His first instinct was
to please the man, treat him with respect. And, she suspected, by now he'd surely have guessed that acting normal was his
only ticket out of the hospital.

28

DONNY MCCARTY spun away from his computer, surprised that the supposed parapsychologist's bona fides checked out. He had visited
the Web site listed on her business card, and though it struck him as a pile of supernatural manure cloaked in psychobabble,
it did at least seem like a genuine snake-oil stand, not a dummy site. To double-check, he'd done a Google search on her name
and had come up with several hundred hits, some linking her with paranormal research topics and some with more mainstream,
academic psychology. Just out of curiosity, he'd gone to the University of New Mexico site and brought up the events calendar,
where, sure enough, she was listed as a speaker at some conference they'd just had. So she was what she claimed to be.

That is, if the woman who had accompanied Julieta was indeed the mysterious Dr. Lucretia Black referred to. There were no
photos on her site, so determining that would take a little more digging, something Nick Stephanovic could see to. Maybe he
was just being paranoid, but paranoia had its uses. It had certainly saved his ass more than once.

Donny stood up and went to the big window that covered most of the west wall of his office. There had never been much to see—
Albuquerque was a flat town, and the nearby buildings of downtown blocked any views of the land beyond—but since they'd built
the Maynard monstrosity across the street there was even less, just a bleak facade of blue-green glass and the wavy reflection
of his own building. The sight only served to irritate him, as always.

Mondays were straight CEO days, when what he had to do was the big-issue stuff: legal battles, major purchaser relations,
regulatory lobbying, strategic planning, new technologies, energy market analysis. He was good at that stuff—better than
Dad had been, certainly—but he looked forward to the end of the week when his role changed with his clothes and he conducted
his round of site inspections. He agreed with Garrett's idea that for a family-owned company to succeed the boss had to stay
in touch with conditions on the ground. It was how you earned the loyalty of the troops, maintained morale and motivation,
kept a real sense of the men, machines, and mountains of rock that lay behind the figures. Donny made a point of dragging
some of the number crunchers along with him, just to get their scrawny asses off their chairs and remind them what it really
meant to dig coal out of the goddamned ground.

And of course there were also the special projects that needed hands-on supervision, where leaving things to middle-management
intermediaries would risk inconveniences and indiscretions.

The sight of the Maynard building began to really get on his nerves, and Donny turned away. Checking his watch, he found that
he had less than twenty minutes before he had to leave for the lunch meeting with the audit team. A bilious, burning sensation
nagged under his breastbone, chronic heartburn or acid reflux or whatever. Stress related, his doctor insisted. To which Donny
had replied, "Tell me something I don't know." Hung in gilt frames on the inner wall, the three oil portraits of his forebears
stared back at him, and the eyes of his father seemed to meet his with a glint of contempt. "You're a worrier," Dad had always
told him. "Can't be a nervous Nellie in this business. Gotta grow a thick skin."

Garrett certainly hadn't been a worrier. He'd been a man of action. Old school: decisive, blunt, charming as hell, bulldog
persistent, clever but not given to deliberation or self-criticism. Dad had neither understood nor accepted the growing complexity
of the energy industry and the politics that went with it. Back in the 1890s when Great-grandfather McCarty had started out,
even in 1964 when Garrett had taken over his father's holdings, the landscape had been pretty wide open. The rules of the
Wild West still pertained, strong guys could still make the rules for themselves and their companies as they went along. If
you ruffled some feathers, got some people's backs up, so be it and devil take 'em, you slugged it out and the best man won.
But it wasn't that way anymore. Energy sources had diversified, coal had lost market share, margins had shrunk. Regulations
had proliferated, citizen action groups had weighed in, the Indians had gotten restless, and politics with the big oil and
nuke guys had gotten complex and devious: your good buddies one minute, competitors who would stick a knife in your back the
next. Plus technology was changing so fast that by the time you finally decided to invest in the latest equipment it had already
been replaced on the cutting edge by something even glitzier, more efficient, and more costly.

Donny looked over the audit materials he'd be reviewing today, increasingly distracted by the gnawing under his ribs. He hated
the sensation, but he'd learned to make use of it: The heartburn was often an indicator that something was on his mind and
needed attention. So what was today's trigger?

Simple: Julieta. That was it. What was she up to? Because, parapsychologist or no parapsychologist, Julieta didn't just visit
the mine for the fun of it.

Garrett's portrait caught his eye, and he could almost hear his father's derisive voice:
Worrier!
To which Donny replied,
Yeah, Dad, I'm a worrier.
Partly because you left me with so many things to worry about. One of them being your sweet ex-wife and all the crap that came with.

A knock sounded at the door to the outer office, and after a pause the heavily paneled walnut slab swung open. Nick Stephanovic
poked his blunt head in.

"Sahib," Nick said. "Just to let you know I'm ready when you are." He extended a thick wrist and tapped his watch.

"Hey, Nicko," Donny said. "I'm almost there. Come in for a minute. Shut the door."

Nick stepped inside, swung the door shut, and stood waiting with his hands folded in front of him. His ancestors were immigrants
who had come to cut timber and lay railroads in the 1880s and had stayed to work in the mines that had flourished throughout
the region. His Czech blood notwithstanding, he had the classic pug nose of the shantytown Irish tough, and though when in
Albuquerque he wore a suit expensive enough for a CEO, it tended to cling to his broad shoulders and bulky upper arms and
did nothing to conceal what he really was: bodyguard, personal assistant, driver, confidential consultant, and odd-job man.
Among the rules Garrett had instilled in Donny from childhood was that you had to build a core of absolutely loyal retainers
around you. In Donny's experience, there was no such thing as absolute loyalty—human sentiment being almost infinitely malleable,
offered the right persuasions—but Nick came close. He was forty-nine, and Donny had inherited him as his right-hand man,
along with the rest of the company, when Garrett had died.

Nothing would surprise Nick. After working for two generations of McCartys, he knew just about everything about McCarty family
business, and what he didn't know he'd been given to surmise.

Donny rolled down his shirtsleeves, took his jacket from the coat-rack behind his desk, slipped it on, shot his cuffs. He
went back to sorting papers, taking his time, letting Nick wait as he thought things through.

"Nick," Donny said finally, "remind me when we found those mutes out at Hunters Point—what was it, last year? Year before?"

"What the hell?"

"You remember our unannounced visitors to the site the other day? Mrs. Ex-McCarty and friend?"

"
That's
what that was about? Mutes?" Nick grinned incredulously.

Donny shrugged. "Supposedly. The woman with her claims to be a paranormal researcher. I've checked her out, she seems legit—
for a purveyor of bull, anyway. I agreed to meet her tomorrow to talk about mutes. Like I'm some kind of expert."

"Why meet with her?"

Donny put the last of the papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut. He felt a hard smile on his lips.
Because,
he told the portrait of his father,
there's more than one way to skin a cat. Sometimes it's better not to just bulldoze your way through. Sometimes you want subtlety, Dad. Finesse.
"Call it counter-intelligence," he told Nick.

Nick nodded, knowing what he meant: trying to figure out what Julieta was up to. "Last year. Spring. Two cut-up horses, over
in the eastern end of Area Eighteen."

"Anything strike you as coincidental about that location?"

Nick's face changed, amused contempt for Julieta giving way to a thoughtful look and then a dangerous glower that Donny savored.

"Oh" was all Nick said.

They didn't say any more as they went through the outer offices, tossed a wave to the secretaries, and walked out to the elevator.
They waited in silence, but once the doors had shushed shut, Donny turned to Nick. "So what's your day like?"

"I got a couple of items, but they can wait if you've got something more pressing."

"This Dr. Lucretia Black, 'Cree' Black. From Seattle. I need to find a photo of her from somewhere. Make sure we're talking
about the same person before I meet her."

"Okay. What else?"

"Supposedly there's something oddball happening at the school. That's what Julieta implied, and I also got one of those tantalizing
wee-hours phone calls from our good friend, suggesting she knew of goings on there that might be of interest to us. It'll
take the usual teasing out and flattery and playing games. But my thought here is, if Julieta has in mind making problems
for us, I'd like to have something we can throw right back at her. Give her grief in return."

"So I should call the nurse."

"Set up a meet with her. Turn on the charm. Remind her how much we loved and relied upon her husband and the rest of it. And
give her my fond regards, of course."

Nick nodded. The elevator braked and the doors hissed open to the basement parking garage. They stepped out and walked to
the silver Mercedes Donny kept for town use. Nick beeped the doors open, got in on the driver's side, and leaned across the
seat to open the door for Donny. When they came up the ramp and into the daylight of downtown Albuquerque, the sun beat down
off the Maynard building with the intensity of a green laser. They turned right and Nick accelerated down the street.

Nick, bless his ugly Czech-Irish mug, knew when to keep quiet and let a man think.

Donny was feeling the familiar weariness come over him, the sense that it was all too much or too pointless. That so much
of what happened or what he did was unnecessary, that there had to be more to life. After this meeting, he'd return to the
office and work until seven, then go home to his suburban mansion in its rectangle of irrigated green lawns so startling against
the brown-dirt desert, and to Liz and the marginal sense of human company she provided. She was young and refreshingly crass
and inventive in bed—more so than he deserved or needed, actually, given the state of his libido; no, he wasn't like the
old bucks of his father's generation. When he'd let her move in, they'd been seeing each other for six months and he'd thought
maybe something would grow between them. But all that had grown was habit. A habitual theater of cohabitation, as good as
it could be given her indeterminate status and the lack of any deeper heat or sense of future. When he thought of coming in
through the chilly, polished-limestone foyer of his house, calling her name, seeing her emerge from the too-large rooms, the
routine faux kiss they'd give each other, he felt a pang of loneliness like a blade that went up through his groin right into
the heartburn behind his breastbone.

Another reason to hate the Maynard building, he thought blackly. Because if you stared hard enough at its wavery, bottle-green
reflection of the windows of the McCarty Energy offices, you could pick out your own window and with effort even the solitary
ghost of a figure standing there. Once he'd leaned close to the glass and waved to see his reflection, a barely discernible
silhouette in the distorted surface light, wave back.

It could have been different. He hadn't always been this way. In high school, there'd been girls he'd loved with innocent
tenderness, the swooning devotion you saw in the movies. Later, there'd been Bernadette, with whom he'd shared a couple of
fairly sweet years until his father had brought home with unnecessary forcefulness just how inappropriate it was to consider
marrying a half-breed.

And, admit it, for a short time, there'd been Julieta. An instant when he'd been able to see her as something other than his
father's hated ex-wife. Her beauty and keen-edged intelligence had always intimidated him, but in the years right after her
divorce she'd seemed to become so much more accessible. So skinny, so fragile. She had to be hurting, Donny knew that much
for sure. She'd acquired appealing shadows under her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and loneliness and doubts about life—
all things Donny shared. For a short period, he had let himself imagine something about himself and about her. Almost-forgotten
longings had blossomed in him and had made him act like a fool.

Julieta had refused to talk to Garrett or allow him on her property, so Donny had served as the company's go-between about
the right-of-way crap Garrett had insisted on fighting out with her after the court had partitioned the property. He'd tried
to do it righteously, hadn't he? Treating her with respect, showing a willingness to compromise? Asking, not demanding or
threatening? She had no idea what it had cost him with Dad, resisting the old man's pressure to up the ante, turn it hostile,
even have Nick do some down and dirty.

Yeah, Donny realized with a shock, that was the last time: that period with Julieta. The last time that whole species of feelings
had awakened in him. Twelve, thirteen years ago!
Sweet Jesus, what a mess of a life.

And that one day he'd been desperate or deluded enough to broach it with her. She'd heard his suggestion—that he had feelings
for her, that there might be something to explore between them, and most of all that he was
not like Garrett
—and what he'd seen in her face wasn't the contempt he'd feared but something far worse: sympathy. She'd put her hand to
his cheek and said, "No, Donny. Look at me—what's left of me. One McCarty was more than enough for this lifetime. Thank you,
but no." A wry and sad grin.