Black House (Page 119)

At the Oak Tree Inn, where he has checked in for the duration of the Fisherman case, Wendell Green is getting sullenly drunk. In spite of three double whiskeys, his neck still aches from having his camera pulled off by the biker ass**le, and his gut still aches from being sucker punched by the Hollywood ass**le. The parts of him that hurt most of all, however, are his pride and his pocketbook. Sawyer concealed evidence just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. Wendell is halfway to believing that Sawyer himself is the Fisherman . . . but how can he prove either thing with his film gone? When the bartender says he has a call, Wendell almost tells him to stick the call up his ass. But he’s a professional, goddamnit, a professional news hawk, and so he goes over to the bar and takes the phone.

"Green," he growls.

"Hello, ass**le," says the cop with the blue cell phone. Wendell doesn’t yet know his caller is a cop, only that it’s some cheery ghoul poaching on his valuable drinking time. "You want to print some good news for a change?"

"Good news doesn’t sell papers, my pal."

"This will. We caught the guy."

"What?" In spite of the three doubles, Wendell Green is suddenly the most undrunk man on the planet.

"Did I stutter?" The caller is positively gloating, but Wendell Green no longer cares. "We caught the Fisherman. Not the staties, not the Feebs, us. Name’s George Potter. Early seventies. Retired builder. Had Polaroids of all three dead kids. If you hustle, you can maybe be here to snap the picture when Dale takes him inside."

This thought — this shining possibility — explodes in Wendell Green’s head like a firework. Such a photo could be worth five times as much as one of little Irma’s corpse, because the reputable mags would want it. And TV! Also, think of this: What if someone shot the bastard as Marshall Dillon was taking him in? Given the town’s mood, it’s far from impossible. Wendell has a brief and brilliant memory of Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his stomach, mouth open in his dying yawp.

"Who is this?" he blurts.

"Officer Fucking Friendly," the voice on the other end says, and clicks off.

In Lucky’s Tavern, Patty Loveless is now informing those assembled (older than the Sand Bar crowd, and a good deal less interested in non-alcoholic substances) that she can’t get no satisfaction and her tractor can’t get no traction. George Potter has finished his spaghetti, neatly folded his napkin (which in the end had to catch only a single drop of red-sauce), and turned seriously to his beer. Sitting close to the juke as he is, he doesn’t notice that the room has quieted with the entrance of three men, only one in uniform but all three armed and wearing what look too much like bulletproof vests to be anything else.

"George Potter?" someone says, and George looks up. With his glass in one hand and his pitcher of suds in the other, he is a sitting duck.

"Yeah, what about it?" he asks, and then he is snatched by the arms and shoulders and yanked from his spot. His knees connect with the bottom of the table, overturning it. The spaghetti plate and the pitcher hit the floor. The plate shatters. The pitcher, made of sterner stuff, does not. A woman screams. A man says, "Yow!" in a low and respectful voice.

Potter holds on to his partly filled glass for a moment, and then Tom Lund plucks this potential weapon from his hand. A second later, Dale Gilbertson is snapping on the cuffs, and Dale has time to think that it’s the most satisfying sound he’s ever heard in his life. His tractor has finally gotten some traction, by God.

This deal is light-years from the snafu at Ed’s; this is slick and tidy. Less than ten seconds after Dale asked the only question — "George Potter?" — the suspect is out the door and into the fog. Tom has one elbow, Bobby the other. Dale is still rattling off the Miranda warning, sounding like an auctioneer on amphetamines, and George Potter’s feet never touch the sidewalk.

Jack Sawyer is fully alive for the first time since he was twelve years old, riding back from California in a Cadillac Eldorado driven by a werewolf. He has an idea that later on he will pay a high price for this regained vividness, but he hopes he will just button his lip and fork over when the time comes. Because the rest of his adult life now seems so gray.

He stands outside his truck, looking in the window at Henry. The air is dank and already charged with excitement. He can hear the blue-white parking lot lights sizzling, like something frying in hot juices.

"Henry."

"Affirmative."

"Do you know the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’?"

"Of course I do. Everyone knows ‘Amazing Grace.’ "

Jack says, " ‘Was blind but now I see.’ I understand that now."

Henry turns his blind, fearfully intelligent face toward Jack. He is smiling. It is the second-sweetest smile Jack has ever seen. The blue ribbon still goes to Wolf, that dear friend of his wandering twelfth autumn. Good old Wolf, who liked everything right here and now.

"You’re back, aren’t you?"

Standing in the parking lot, our old friend grins. "Jack’s back, that’s affirmative."

"Then go do what you came back to do," Henry says.

"I want you to roll up the windows."

"And not be able to hear? I think not," Henry tells him, pleasantly enough.

More cops are coming, and this time the blue lights of the lead car are flashing and the siren is blurping. Jack detects a celebratory note to those little blurps and decides he doesn’t have time to stand here arguing with Henry about the Ram’s windows.

He heads for the back door of the police station, and two of the blue-white arcs cast his shadow double on the fog, one dark head north and one south.