Otherworld (18 page)

He still looked forward to seeing her. Deep down, though he didn't explore the thought fully, Mike believed there was still a chance at reconciliation.

Mike pulled into the driveway of the modest one-story home. As he removed his overnight bag from the backseat, he realized that Dallas was not as cold as Houston.

He rang the doorbell, and Molly answered. She smiled when she saw him, and it made her look pretty despite the obvious signs of heavy crying on her face. She looked altogether unflattering with her eyes red and puffy, her hair disheveled, and her face devoid of makeup. The figure he often admired in secret was obscured in the fluffy folds of a gray sweat suit. Mike loved this woman, and the distance and his desire covered her multitude of cosmetic sins. The emptiness of not seeing her every day made her appear as beautiful as she had been on their wedding day.

He stepped in, and she hugged him. Again, the thought that
this could be my chance
surfaced, but he stifled it and felt guilty.
Her sister died, you jerk!

“I made some coffee. Do you want some?” she asked.

“Sure.”

He set his bag down. Molly went into the kitchen, and Mike stepped into the living room. An abstract painting of a vague human form stared at him, though the person had no distinguishable eyes. He sat down.

Molly came in and handed him a mug that had obviously belonged to Vickie. It read: DON'T BUG ME! ARTIST IN CREATIVE TRANCE.

“Thank you for coming so soon,” Molly said.

“Well, I didn't want you to have to be by yourself.”

She smiled again. “I'm sorry to put all this on you. I just … I don't think I can handle it.”

“I understand. It's okay. I called from Houston and made all the arrangements. The funeral will be the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, I'll go down and … well, you know.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry about this, Mike. I just wouldn't be able to do it.”

“I know. It's okay.”

“Did you find a minister?”

“Yeah. I need to head back tomorrow and pick him up. I just didn't know who to get here in Dallas. Robbie recommended this guy to me.”

“You couldn't get ahold of Reverend Ayers?”

“He's out of town. Anyways, we'll be back sometime tomorrow night, probably late.”

“Do you really have to drive all the way home and all the way back?”

“Well, I thought I should at least meet the guy and be able to tell him about Vickie.”

Molly nodded.

Mike told her more about the arrangements. The service would be graveside at the Roselawn Cemetery. That would be in the obituary appearing in the next day's newspaper, but he asked if she would be able to call some of Vickie's friends to let them know. Molly answered that she would probably be able to do that, but as it turned out, the matter was not very pressing. Vickie didn't have any close friends—only a few acquaintances and admirers of her work.

They made small talk into the late hours of the night. When a lull came in the conversation, Molly rose and went in to turn off the coffeepot. When she returned, she said, “Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for doing all this.”

He smiled.

Meekly, she again said, “Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think maybe you could sleep in the bed with me tonight?”

“Sure,” he said, and he smiled a calm and gentle smile, a reassuring smile, a comforting
everything-will-be-okay
smile, but inside his heart leaped for joy.

 

Police car headlights brightened the road in front of the Diaz home. Hands that gripped flashlights were numb from the cold even inside the insulation of gloves. The lights' bulbous glares danced around, shining this way and that like mutant fireflies. Officers from the Trumbull Police Department, including Captain Graham Lattimer, searched through the bushes and the fields and the patches of woods for
the bad man
, but they did not find him. They found no trace of
the good man
either.

 

The small Dart 'n Shop convenience store stayed open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-four days a year in Trumbull, Texas. Daryl Worth hated that fact. He worked the midnight to 7:00 a.m. shift. The only thing that kept him awake was the expectation of a surprise visit from the store's manager (which he was still young enough to believe might happen) and the fear all graveyard-shift grocers have of gun-toting, homicidal thieves (which he was old enough to be paranoid about).

Daryl read a Silver Surfer comic book and sipped a soda, watching out of the corner of his eye the young kid who walked up and down the aisles. The kid's pants and shirt were dirty. Dead leaves clung to them. He looked like he had been rolling around in the woods, and Daryl supposed maybe he had. The red markings of skin abrasions covered his arms and face. And he had a wicked-looking tattoo.

Maybe he's been in a fight
,
Daryl thought, and not just because he looked like a kid who had been in a fight, but also because he looked like a kid who
would
get into a fight. The kind of kid you don't bring to your house to play after school, because he'd probably steal your stuff or convince you to play some stupid game like “Who Can Take the Hardest Punch?” or “How Close to Our Feet Can We Throw a Knife Without Cutting Off a Toe?” He also had that blank stare so common in neighborhood bullies and the high school tyrants they eventually grew into. The only thing that changed about these kids was the name of the rock bands on their T-shirts.

The kid turned a corner and headed to the big refrigerated coolers in the rear of the store. He stopped at the alcohol cooler, his eyes scanning the cans and bottles of beer. Meanwhile, Daryl scanned the kid. In the back pocket of the kid's blue jeans, a handle peeked out, and Daryl led himself to believe the handle belonged to a knife.

The cooler opened, and the kid pulled out a white-labeled can. He turned around and walked toward the counter. Only by accident, Daryl looked into the kid's eyes, but only briefly. They were black and lifeless and piercing.

In that splinter of a moment, Daryl's imagination went into irrational overdrive.
Maybe he's going to kill me.

The kid placed the can on the counter.

“Is that all for you?” Daryl managed to ask.

The kid nodded.

Daryl did not want to say it, but he did anyway: “Can I see some ID, please?”

Nothing happened at first. The kid bore into Daryl with those dead eyes of his, and Daryl could feel them, though he didn't look at them. Then Daryl saw the arm reach around to the back pocket, and his first thought came:
He's getting his ID
,
but then he realized, and
knew
—so quickly he froze in his place, eyes bulging and throat swelling—
He's going for the knife.

It didn't seem irrational anymore.

The kid's arm swung back around, and Daryl wanted to jump but couldn't, and before he could even scream, the kid's hand lay before him, a cheap wallet dangling from his fingers.

“Here,” the kid said, and he dropped it clumsily onto the counter. Daryl picked it up and opened it. It had a Velcro fastener, and the sound as it tore open amplified a hundred times in the cold, still air of the convenience store. The appearance of the wallet did not allay the terror quivering in Daryl's spine. He dug through it cautiously. No driver's license. No identification of any kind. Not even any money. Just a little, dog-eared photograph of a woman. Probably the kid's mother.

Daryl didn't want to say it. “There's no ID in here.”

The kid looked blankly at the wallet in Daryl's hands. He snatched it back and reached around to place it in his pocket. He bowed over the counter, his face hovering inches from Daryl's own, and suddenly, the shining blade of the knife swept into focus, a cold steel shark fin slicing through the air.

The kid said, “Give … me the … m-money in the … in the … in the
thing
.” He poked his weapon in the direction of the cash register.

Daryl obliged, scooping up all the bills from the cash drawer into a neat stack, never averting his gaze from the knife trembling in the kid's hand. He offered the money, but the kid didn't accept it immediately. He stared at it, a quizzical look upon his face. He seemed to think,
What's all that for?
but after a few seconds, he grabbed it and shoved the bills into his pants—not into his pocket, but down the front of his pants. Then his glare fell onto Daryl, and Daryl felt it fall, hot and stinging and brutally intense. The clerk looked into the evil eyes for the second time and saw
something
in them. He saw the wickedness that dwelled inside; he saw it alive and screaming and squirming to get out and attack.

He's going to kill me.

In a broad roundhouse stroke, the kid swiped at Daryl's face with the knife. Daryl's immobility dissolved, and he jerked back, the knife barely missing the tip of his chin. He stumbled backward, tripped over his own feet, and fell down hard on his behind. The counter obstructed his view of the kid, and Daryl expected to see him lunge over it wildly any second, mouth drooling and fist clenching his instrument of death, eager for blood.

But the kid didn't attack. He fled out the door and into the night.

Daryl stood up, his knees knocking, and glanced around the store. He fumbled for the phone and called the police.

Jimmy Horn's days were numbered.

 

Yes, someone will definitely have to teach that Southern boy Graham Lattimer a thing or two
, Pops Dickey thought, and he closed his eyes to get some sleep. A few minutes later, his drift into unconsciousness not yet realized, he heard a scratching noise from within the wall behind his bed. He opened his eyes, letting them adjust to the darkness in his bedroom. The noise came again—
scritch
,
scritch
,
scritch
—like something alive, not random like the brush of a tree limb. A mouse, maybe. And it was down low, at the base of the wall, and
in
the wall, not outside of it. Pops decided that it was a mouse, and it upset him a little, because he never had mice before.

He closed his eyes. The scratching came again, only this time much louder, resembling a tearing sound, more than a scratching. If there was a mouse in Pops's wall, it was a big sucker. It sounded like it planned on coming right through the wall itself! It sounded like—

The window over the bed began to rattle, and Pops almost thought it was caused by the wind, but the inside of the house began to rattle as well. The portrait of him and Gertie hanging on the wall swayed back and forth. The dresser shook, and so did the bed. He expected the pane above him to implode, drenching the bed with a glittering rain of glass.

“What in God's name?” he said aloud.

Then a blinding white light filled the room, invading every corner. The light was hot and fierce, an atomic blast emanating from somewhere outside and shooting directly into his bedroom, and the old man could not see a thing save stark whiteness.