Strangers (44 page)

“Miss? Hey, miss?”

Ginger blinked and turned stiffly toward the voice, which came from the back of the truck. She saw a man on his hands and knees, looking under the tailgate. For a moment she thought it was the gunman.

“Miss? What’s wrong?”

Not the gunman. Evidently, he had given up when he couldn’t find her quickly and had fled. This was someone she had never seen before, and this was one occasion when a stranger’s face was welcome.

He said, “What the hell are you doing under there?”

Ginger was filled with self-pity. She realized how she had looked, running crazily through the neighborhood like some demented freak. All dignity had been stolen from her.

She squirmed toward the man who had spoken to her, grasped the gloved hand he offered, and allowed him to help her slide out from beneath the truck, which proved to be a Mayflower Moving Company van. The rear doors were open. She glanced inside and saw boxes, furniture. The guy who had pulled her out was young, brawny, and dressed in quilted thermal coveralls with the Mayflower logo stitched across the chest.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Who’re you hiding from, lady?”

As the Mayflower man spoke, Ginger noticed a policeman standing in the middle of the intersection half a block away, directing traffic, where a signal light had failed. She ran toward him.

The Mayflower man called after her.

She was surprised she could run at all. She felt as if she were a creature constructed of nothing but aches and pains and chills. Yet she ran with a dreamy effortlessness into the shrieking wind. The gutters were full of icy slush, but the street itself was relatively dry and calcimine-streaked with deicing compounds. Dodging out of the way of a couple of oncoming cars, she even found the strength to call out to the cop as she drew near him. “There’s been a man killed! Murder! You’ve got to come! Murder!” Then, when he started toward her with a look of concern on his broad Irish face, she saw the shiny brass buttons on his heavy, winter-weight uniform coat, and all was lost again. They were not exactly like the buttons on the leather topcoat the killer had been wearing; they were not decorated with a lion passant, but with some other raised figure. But
one glimpse sent her thoughts flashing toward remembrance of buttons she had seen
then,
during the mysterious events at the Tranquility Motel. Some forbidden recollection began to surface, and that pulled the Azrael Trigger.

As she lost control and ran off into her private darkness, the last thing she heard was her own pathetic cry of despair.

•

Coldest.

That morning, at least for Ginger Weiss, Boston was the coldest place on earth. Bitter, polar, piercing, marrow-freezing, the January day induced a glaciation of the spirit as well as the flesh. When the fugue receded, she was sitting on the ground in ice and snow. Her hands and feet were numb, stiff. Her lips were chapped and cracked.

This time she had taken refuge in the narrow space between a row of well-manicured bushes and a brick building, in a shadowy corner where the angled wall of a bay-windowed tower met a flat portion of the main facade. The former Hotel Agassiz. Where Pablo had his apartment. Where he had been killed. She had come nearly full circle.

She heard someone approaching. Between the hoary branches of the snow-dressed and ice-laced shrubs, she saw someone climbing over the low wrought-iron fence that separated the front lawn from the sidewalk. She did not see the person himself, merely his booted feet, legs clad in blue trousers, and the flaps of a long, heavy, navy-blue coat. But as he came across the narrow strip of lawn toward the shrubbery, she knew who he was: the traffic cop from whom she had turned and run.

Fearing yet another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, Ginger closed her eyes.

Perhaps irreversible psychological damage was a side-effect of the brainwashing she had undergone, an inevitable result of the tremendous and constant stress generated by the artificially repressed memories struggling mightily to make themselves known. Even if she could find another hypnotist to do for her what Pablo had done, perhaps there was no way the block could be broken or the pressure relieved, in which case she was destined to deteriorate further. If she was stricken by three fugues in one morning, what was to prevent three more in the next hour?

The policeman’s boots crunched noisily through the sleet-skinned snow. He stopped in front of her. She heard him pressing against the low bushes and parting them to look into her hiding place. “Miss? Hey, what’s wrong? What were you shouting about murder? Miss?”

Maybe she would fall into a fugue and
remain
there forever.

“Oh, now, what’re you crying about?” the cop said sympathetically. “Darlin’, I can’t help if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

She would not be the daughter of Jacob Weiss if she failed to respond warmly and eagerly to the slightest sign of kindness in others, and the policeman’s concern finally affected her. She opened her eyes and looked up at the topmost brass button on his coat. The sight of it did not bring the hateful darkness upon her. But that meant nothing, for the ophthalmoscope, black gloves, and other triggering items had not affected her later, when she had forced herself to confront them again.

In a crackle of ice, the cop pushed between the bushes.

She said, “They’ve killed Pablo. They murdered Pablo.”

And as she spoke those words, her distress over her condition was made worse by a rush of guilt. The 6th of January would forever be a black day in her life. Pablo was dead. Because he tried to help her.

Such a very cold day.

5

On the Road

Monday morning, the 6th of January, Dom Corvaisis cruised his old Portland neighborhood in a rented Chevrolet, trying to recapture the mood he had been in when he had left Oregon for Mountainview, Utah, more than eighteen months ago. The rain, as heavy as any he had ever seen, had stopped near dawn. Now the sky, though still cloudy from horizon to horizon, was a particularly powdery, dry-looking shade of gray, like a burnt field, as if there had been a fire behind the clouds that had forced out all that precipitation. He drove through the university campus, stopping repeatedly to let the familiar scenes stir feelings and attitudes of times past. He parked across the street from the apartment where he’d lived, and as he stared up at the windows, he tried to recall the man he had been then.

He was surprised at how difficult it was to recollect the timidity with which that other Dom Corvaisis had viewed life. Though he could bring to mind the way he had been, there was no intimacy or poignancy to those memories. He could see those old days again, but he could not
feel
them, which seemed to indicate that he could never be that old Dom again, regardless of how much he feared the possibility.

He was convinced that he had seen something terrible on the road the summer before last, and that something monstrous had been done to him. But that conviction generated both a mystery and a contradiction. The mystery was that the event had wrought in him an undeniably positive
change. How could an experience fraught with pain and terror effect a beneficial change in his outlook? The contradiction was that, in spite of the beneficial effect on his personality, the event filled his dreams with horror. How could his ordeal have been both terrifying and positive, both horrible and uplifting at the same time?

The answer, if it could be found, was not here in Portland but out on the highway. He started the engine, put the Chevy in gear, pulled away from his old apartment building, and went looking for trouble.

•

The most direct route from Portland to Mountainview began with Interstate 80 north. But as he had done nineteen months ago, Dom took a more roundabout trail, heading south on Interstate 5. That special summer, he had scheduled a layover in Reno for a few days to do some research for a series of short stories about gambling, so the less direct route had been necessary.

Now in his rented Chevy, he followed the familiar highway, keeping his speed down to fifty, even as low as forty on the steeper hills, for he had been pulling a U-Haul trailer that last day in June, and he had not made good time. And, as before, he stopped for lunch in Eugene.

Hoping to spot something that would goose his memory and provide a link with the mysterious events of the previous trip, Dom looked over the small towns that he passed. However, he saw nothing that made him uneasy, and nothing bad happened all the way to Grants Pass, where he arrived shortly before six o’clock that evening, right on schedule.

He stayed in the motel where he had been a guest eighteen months ago. He remembered the number of the room—ten—because it was near the soft drink and ice machines, which had been the source of irritating noises half the night. It was unoccupied, and he took it, vaguely explaining to the clerk that it had sentimental associations for him.

He ate at the same restaurant, across the road from the motel.

He was seeking
satori,
which was a Zen word meaning “sudden enlightenment,” a profound revelation. But enlightenment eluded him.

All day he had used the rearview mirror, hoping to spot a tail. During dinner, he surreptitiously watched the other customers. But if he was being followed, his tail was masterful, invisible.

At nine o’clock, rather than use the telephone in his room, he walked to a nearby service station pay phone. With his credit card, he placed a call to the number of another pay phone in Laguna Beach. By prearrangement, Parker Faine was waiting there with a report on the mail that he had collected for Dom earlier in the day. There was little chance that either of their phones was tapped; however, after receiving those two disturbing
Polaroid snapshots, Dom had decided (and Parker had agreed) that in this case prudence and paranoia were synonymous.

“Bills,” Parker said, “advertisements. No more strange messages, and no more Polaroids. How’s it going at your end?”

“Nothing so far,” Dom said, leaning wearily against the Plexiglas and aluminum wall of the phone booth. “Didn’t sleep well last night.”

“But you didn’t go for a walk?”

“Didn’t even get one knot untied. Had a nightmare, though. The moon again. Anybody follow you to that pay phone?”

“Not unless he was as thin as a dime and a master of camouflage,” Parker said. “So you can call me here again tomorrow night and not have to worry that they’ve tapped the line.”

“We sound like two madmen,” Dom said.

“I’m kind of having fun,” Parker said. “Cops and robbers, hide and seek, spies—I was always good at games like that when I was a kid. You just hang in there, my friend. And if you need help, I’ll come fast.”

“I know,” Dom said.

He walked back to the motel through a cold damp wind. As in the hotel in Portland, he woke three times before dawn, always surfacing from an unremembered nightmare, always shouting about the moon.

•

Tuesday, January 7, Dom rose early and drove to Sacramento, then took Interstate 80 east toward Reno. Rain fell, silvery and cold, for most of the drive, and by the time he reached the foothills of the Sierras, it was snowing. He stopped at an Arco station, bought tire chains, and put them on before heading into the mountains.

The summer before last, he had taken more than ten hours to get from Grants Pass to Reno, and this time the drive took even longer. When he finally checked in at Harrah’s Hotel where he had stayed before, called Parker Faine from a pay phone, and had a bite of dinner in the coffee shop, he was too tired to do anything but pick up a copy of the Reno newspaper and return to his room. So at eight-thirty that evening, sitting in bed in his underwear, he saw the story about Zebediah Lomack.

MOON MAN’S ESTATE WORTH HALF A MILLION DOLLARS

There was more to the story, which had apparently been a local sensation for the past two weeks. Dom read with growing fascination and uneasiness. Most likely, Zebediah Lomack’s mad obsession with the moon had nothing to do with Dom’s own problems. Coincidence. Yet…he felt a stirring of precisely that fear—part terror, part horror, and part awe—that filled him when he woke from his nightmares, that also overwhelmed him when he went sleepwalking and tried to nail windows shut.

He pored over the article several times, and at nine-fifteen, in spite of his weariness, he decided that he had to get a look in the Lomack house. He dressed, retrieved his rented car from the hotel’s valet parking, and got directions to Wass Valley Road from the attendant. Reno was below the snow line, so the night was dry and the roads clean. Dom stopped at an all-night Sav-On drugstore to buy a flashlight. He arrived at 1420 Wass Valley Road shortly after ten o’clock and parked across the street.