Sleeping Policemen (28 page)

But it wasn't his fault. How else could he have chosen?

Nick rested his head against the phone. That scrap of rhyme danced through his head—

—
he marched them up the hill and he marched them down again
—

—abruptly powerless. It seemed a small thing suddenly, a child's magic, too small to help him now.

Nothing could help him now.

Cold. So cold. He sighed and he could see his breath clouding the air around him, and then he couldn't see much of anything at all beyond the blur of tears.

“I'm sorry?” the woman said. Breathless. Shocked.

“Die,” he whispered. “If you don't help me, they're all going to die—”

“Hold one moment, please,” she said, a new urgency in her voice. And this time the wait was just a minute, maybe half a measure of Bach and the tiny computer voice asking for more quarters. Nick dug in his jacket without looking up; he slotted quarters into the machine until his pocket was empty. Another coin chimed to the pavement and rolled away. This time, Nick didn't even bother to watch it, just gave himself over to sobs, that vision of Finney's hand closing around the bullet, his last gesture.

Save her
, Finney had said.
He
had chosen, it was
his
fault.

“Sir—”

A man's voice.

“Senator—”

“Sir, my name is Gerald McClain. With the Capital Police. I understand there have been some threats—”

“No, no threats. Just, please, you have to help me. You have to help Finney, you have to help us—”

“Sir, if you can just calm down, explain to me what's happening—”

“My fault,” Nick said, and it was like a light going on inside his head, illuminating every secret he had hoped to hide from itself. Exposing him. His weakness. The dark self locked away inside his heart. His guilt and jealousy.
My fault
, he thought,
my fault, I did it, I let Finney die, I wanted him to die
.

And now Sue would die, too. Because of his delay, his stupidity in failing to recognize a truth his father had known all along: you had to take care of yourself. The system didn't care about people like him.

McClain said, “I understand you've made some threats to Senator Durant's family—”

“I need to speak to him,” Nick whispered.

“Maybe in a little while,” McClain said. “But first—”

“Goddamnit, he may not be dead if you'd just listen to me—”

Nick slammed the phone into its cradle.

Finney, Finney—

He was dead
, Nick thought.
He was already dead when Evans closed the trunk, I didn't leave him there to die, I didn't
—

He had to know, he had to know for himself.

He turned, staggering back toward the car like a man half-drunk. Tears blinded him. He fumbled for the keys. It took him a minute or two to fit the key into the right slot, and then he had the trunk open. Finney lay crumpled within, still half-wrapped in heavy, clear plastic, smaller somehow than Nick had ever seen him.

And still. So still.

Nick went down to his knees, his arms outstretched, in prayer or sorrow, he could not say.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

And for a moment—just a moment—he stepped fully across that borderline, into the land of madness. He surrendered himself to that siren song, let it sweep him away, everything lost, pain and fear and responsibility. Guilt. Hatred for what he had become. For a moment, seduced into madness, Nick Laymon was nothing more than a husk, lungs like bellows, heart throbbing, blood whirling through his veins, but empty, empty of self, or soul. And then a voice:

“Sir? Are you all right?”

Nick turned.

The cashier. He stood maybe twenty feet away, younger than Nick had thought, twenty-one or two, no older, his face taut with concern. He was Nick's age. But for the rattle of a car hurling itself over the form of a sleeping policeman he might have
been
Nick. But he wasn't.

“Sorry about the oil,” someone said; it took a moment for Nick to recognize his own voice, the absurd apology.

“Were you in an accident? You need me to call the police?”

The cashier took a step closer. He cocked his head, like he was trying to see something. Trying to get a look into the trunk.

At Finney.

Nick stumbled to his feet. He slammed the trunk.

“No,” he said. “Don't call anyone.”

And then he was in the car, jabbing the key into the ignition and wrenching it hard to the right. The engine coughed, hesitated for a moment, caught. The digital clock on the dash flared to life.

3:44.

Fifteen minutes and Sue would lose another finger. He could see the cigar cutter, gleaming in the light. He had never seen anything so clearly.

He forced the thought from his mind, dismissed Sue and the Pachyderm and all that had happened in the past two days. That road led to the country ruled by madness. She was out there, he could hear her—

—
madness
—

—crooning his name softly, like a lover, like Sue had not twelve hours ago.

There would be time for that, but not now. He couldn't afford that luxury right now. Already he had wasted another hour—

—
another finger
—

He would not waste anything more.

Nick yanked the shifter into reverse. The car surged backward, the steering wheel spinning through his hands. In the rearview mirror, he caught a glimpse of the cashier darting out of his way, but that didn't matter either, not anymore. Yanking the gear shift into drive, he punched the gas. He hit the road without slowing down and pointed the cruiser's nose toward the mountains, toward Sue—

—
toward the Pachyderm
—

—the seconds crashing like mortar fire all around him.

Tuesday, 3:45 to 4:36 PM

The drive to Knoxville—his third in less than seventy-two hours—was a nightmare ride on a runaway roller coaster. Nick tried to fill his mind with waves, to lose himself in that relentless surf—but the memory of the phone call kept coming back to him, the cop's voice—

—
you've been making some threats
—

—so infuriatingly soothing, as if he could talk all the insanity away.

He wanted to pull over, rest his head against the steering wheel, let madness take him once again, but he forced himself to go on, clinging to that image of Sue—

—
Hurry, Nicky
—

—like a talisman as he wheeled Evans's car back through Ransom, ascending toward the mountains. Once, he glanced down at the speedometer—and discovered his hands swollen to twice their normal size. He looked quickly away, ignoring the hammer of his heart.

Sue
, he thought.
I'm coming
.

Wind whistled through the hole in the windshield and roared in from the shot-out window behind him, filling the car with ghostly shouts, the cries of his dead friends, the plaintive pleading of Sue. He cranked the heat and drove faster, his breath pluming before him in wordless prayers, the lizard-tongue of the speedometer needle licking the 80, then the 90 on the straight stretches. His hands, grossly ballooned, swallowed the steering wheel.

He slowed as he climbed deeper into the mountains, the tires squealing, the chassis complaining on the serpentine ribbon of road. At one point, Nick caught a glimpse of half-familiar slope and foliage. The car seemed to lurch across the form of a monstrous sleeping policeman. He cried aloud, gripping the wheel hard with both hands, knowing the place at some inarticulate, cellular level. He could feel it in the chill that prickled across his skin, could see it flashing by: the spot where the Aryan—

—
Aubrey, his name was Aubrey
—

—had lain, the bend where Pomeroy had flashed his brake lights, the scenic overlook where Evans had hurled Finney into the abyss.

Ghostly voices crowded the car.

Fucking speed bump
.

We have to think this thing through
.

The money, Nick. Nice little nest egg
.

Nick glanced into the rearview mirror. Finney and Tucker sat framed there, their faces deathly pale.

This is your fault
, Tucker said.
You made us go back
.

What now, Nicky?
Finney said.
Think you can still ride this out?

“Don't call me Nicky,” he muttered.

Then Sue's voice drifted lazily over theirs:
Time is everything, sweetheart
. Stifling the scream that welled in his throat, Nick fumbled at the dash, shutting off the heat. Cold wind swept the ghosts from the car, their voices lost and fading.

He drove, filling his head with the white noise of the wind—

—
the waves
—

—ignoring the glimmering beacon of the digital clock. He came out of the mountains hearing Sue's whimpers, hit the highway leading into the city as her face twisted in a rictus of terrible pain, her eyes glazing with that dreadful emptiness.

Just outside of Knoxville—the city spreading before him like an oilspill—Nick looked over to see his father sitting beside him. Staring straight ahead, Frank Laymon said, “Time waits for no man.”

“Don't I know it, Dad,” he mumbled, pressing the accelerator to the floor. The jittery needle edged up to 80. As he looped to the left of the downtown district, a Tennessee Highway Patrol car passed in the opposite lane. The officer watched Nick fly by, his mouth and eyes widening into small circles of surprise.

Nick looked over to the other seat. His father still sat there, his legs twisted like licorice under the dash.

“You've done all you can,” his father said. “Come home, come back to Glory.”

Nick thought about how easy it would be simply to turn around and disappear over the horizon. Ditch the cruiser, hitch the rest of the way home, lose himself in the bayou. Sam and Jake would find him work; day after tomorrow he could be lost in the endless swell of the Gulf, working one of the cyclopean rigs. It was almost too simple.

Then time crashed down upon him and his mind filled with Sue Thompson, the way her lithe form had unfolded over him two nights ago, the way he had so naturally slipped into her warmth. As in a nightmare, he watched her scramble across Gutman's desk, the humidor flipping silently through the air, her face a mask of horrid helplessness. The cigar trimmer snarled hungrily in Gutman's Jekyll hand.

Please, Nicky. Promise me
.

Without his realizing it, the car slowed to sixty, fifty, traffic blurring around him. Nick gripped the wheel—his hands, he noticed, deflated to a normal size—and punched the accelerator. Frank Laymon had disappeared, blown away like so much vapor.

4:24 Finney's watch said; 4:29 according to the dash clock.

For one bad moment, he had no idea where to go, what road to take to find Pachyderm Video Security; the landscape—every exit, every barren tree and sagging outbuilding—looked maddeningly the same. Nick screamed in frustration and slammed his fist into the dashboard. He swerved into the right lane—nearly clipping the rear bumper of a little, blue-haired lady's BMW—and saw the sign: KNOXVILLE INDUSTRIAL PARK 1/4 MILE. Everything fell into place: plastic crèche scenes and rusted swing sets, clapboard houses and yellowed lawns, all discolored by the heatless rays of a December sun.

He took the exit at fifty, tires squealing, inertia bearing into him like a fist; a horn blared behind him. He crested a hill and caught a glimpse of a Tennessee Highway Patrol car as it blew past in the rearview mirror, sunlight sparkling off the windshield, doing at least a hundred, blue lights pulsing. For one horrifying second, Nick knew it was Evans come back. Then he remembered his last sight of the patrolman, laid out in Finney's tub, two slits—like lipless mouths—opening in his abdomen.

He sped through the bleak neighborhood, the potholed road like a serpent twisting upon itself. He slowed only when he caught sight of the chain-link fence surrounding Gutman's compound. He stopped a hundred yards from the gate, the dull gray aluminum building like a mirage through the dead foliage. He had no plan, none at all.

4:28.

The engine idled like a hungry beast. He inched the car forward. He could see security cameras mounted atop each side of the gate, their heads slowly rotating like mechanical birds. He braked again, pulling Pomeroy's gun out of the back of his pants and checking the rounds. Five bullets. He thought of the loose bullet in the trunk, Finney's hand closing around it in that last fatal reflex. In almost the same moment, he dismissed it, knowing he'd never be able to open the trunk again.

Time, he thought. Time.

He leaned over and retrieved the guns from the floorboard. He ejected the .45's clip and shook loose eight rounds. Pomeroy's second gun held five rounds, the hammer down on an empty chamber. Eighteen chances to free Sue. The number seemed impossibly small.

He put the car in reverse and backed carefully up the road. When the gate was barely in sight, he stopped and shifted into drive. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and breathed a silent prayer. What gods would listen to him at this point he had no idea.

4:31.

He sat up, gripping the wheel, his knuckles white. He situated himself in the seat and snapped the seatbelt around him. With no plan at all, his mind a void except for the pulsating image of Sue Thompson writhing, screaming, he stood on the accelerator.

Hurry, Nicky.

Like a wild beast suddenly free of its chain, the cruiser lunged forward, tires shrieking at the pavement, the engine roaring.

He saw only the gate, a rusted chain-link fence that divided the world into diamonds, slightly larger versions of the caging behind him. It grew rapidly—so fast that Nick felt a disorienting vertigo sweep through him. The gate filled the windshield; he could see the tiny flecks of rust, newly oiled hinges, a spider scurrying across one of the horizontal supports.