Black House (Page 122)

"Motors," Henry says promptly. "A lot of them. They’re east of here, but coming this way. Edge of town. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but it sounds like the party next door is like, over, dude."

As if this were a cue, Ernie Therriault’s distressed cry comes through the door. "Ohhhh, shit."

Dit Jesperson: "What’s — "

Ernie: "Get the chief. Aw, never mind, I’ll — " There is a single perfunctory knock and then Ernie’s looking in at the brain trust. He’s as collected and soldierly as ever, but his cheeks have paled considerably beneath his summer tan, and a vein is pulsing in the middle of his forehead.

"Chief, I just took a call on the 911, twenty was the Sand Bar?"

"That hole," Dale mutters.

"Caller was the bartender. Says about fifty to seventy people are on their way." By now the sound of approaching engines is very loud. It sounds to Henry like the Indy 500 just before the pace car runs for dear life and the checkered flag drops.

"Don’t tell me," Dale says. "What do I need to make my day complete? Let me think. They’re coming to take my prisoner."

"Umm, yes, sir, that’s what the caller said," Ernie agrees. Behind him, the other cops are silent. In that moment they don’t look like cops at all to Dale. They look like nothing but dismayed faces crudely drawn on a dozen or so white balloons (also two black ones — can’t forget Pam Stevens and Bob Holtz). The sound of the engines continues to grow. "Also might want to know one other thing the caller said?"

"Christ, what?"

"Said the, um . . ." Ernie searches for a word that isn’t mob. "The protest group was being led by the Freneau girl’s mom?"

"Oh . . . my . . . Christ," Dale says. He gives Jack a look of sick panic and utter frustration — the look of a man who knows he is dreaming but can’t seem to wake up no matter how hard he tries. "If I lose Potter, Jack, French Landing is going to be the lead story on CNN tomorrow morning."

Jack opens his mouth to reply, and the cell phone in his pocket picks that moment to start up its annoying tweet.

Henry Leyden immediately crosses his arms and tucks his hands into his armpits. "Don’t hand it to me," he says. "Cell phones give you cancer. We agreed on that."

Dale, meanwhile, has left the room. As Jack digs for the cell phone (thinking someone has picked a cataclysmically shitty time to ask him about his network television preferences), Henry follows his nephew, walking briskly with his hands now held slightly out, fingers gently fluttering the air, seeming to read the currents for obstacles. Jack hears Dale saying that if he sees a single drawn weapon, the person who drew it will join Arnie Hrabowski on the suspension list. Jack is thinking exactly one thing: no one is taking Potter anywhere until Jack Sawyer has had time to put a few pointed questions. No way.

He flicks the cell phone open and says, "Not now, whoever you are. We’ve got — "

"Hidey-ho, Travelin’ Jack," says the voice from the phone, and for Jack Sawyer the years once more roll away.

"Speedy?"

"The very one," Speedy says. Then the drawl is gone. The voice becomes brisk and businesslike. "And as one coppiceman to another, son, I think you ought to visit Chief Gilbertson’s private bathroom. Right now."

Outside, there are enough vehicles arriving to shake the building. Jack has a bad feeling about this; has since he heard Ernie say who was leading the fools’ parade.

"Speedy, I don’t exactly have the time to visit the facilities right n — "

"You haven’t got time to visit anyplace else," Speedy replies coldly. Only now he’s the other one. The hard boy named Parkus. "What you’re gonna find there you can use twice. But if you don’t use it almighty quick the first time, you won’t need it the second time. Because that man is gonna be up a lamppost."

And just like that, Speedy is gone.

When Tansy leads the willing patrons into the Sand Bar’s parking lot, there is none of the carnival raucousness that was the keynote of the cluster f**k at Ed’s Eats & Dawgs. Although most of the folks we met at Ed’s have been spending the evening in the Bar, getting moderately to seriously tanked, they are quiet, even funereal, as they follow Tansy out and fire up their cars and pickups. But it’s a savage funereality. She has taken something in from Gorg — some stone powerful poison — and passed it along to them.

In the belt of her slacks is a single crow feather.

Doodles Sanger takes her arm and guides her sweetly to Teddy Runkleman’s International Harvester pickup. When Tansy heads for the truck bed (which already holds two men and one hefty female in a white rayon waitress’s uniform), Doodles steers her toward the cab. "No, honey," Doodles says, "you sit up there. Be comfy."

Doodles wants that last place in the truck bed. She’s spotted something, and knows just what to do with it. Doodles is quick with her hands, always has been.

The fog isn’t thick this far from the river, but after two dozen cars and trucks have spun out of the Bar’s dirt parking lot, following Teddy Runkleman’s dented, one-taillight I.H., you can barely see the tavern. Inside, only half a dozen people are left — these were somehow immune to Tansy’s eerily powerful voice. One of them is Stinky Cheese, the bartender. Stinky has a lot of liquid assets to protect out here and isn’t going anywhere. When he calls 911 and speaks to Ernie Therriault, it will be mostly in the spirit of petulance. If he can’t go along and enjoy the fun, by God, at least he can spoil it for the rest of those monkeys.

Twenty vehicles leave the Sand Bar. By the time the caravan passes Ed’s Eats (the lane leading to it cordoned off by yellow tape) and the NO TRESPASSING sign alongside the overgrown lane to that queer forgotten house (not cordoned off; not even noticed, for that matter), the caravan has grown to thirty. There are fifty cars and trucks rolling down both lanes of Highway 35 by the time the mob reaches Goltz’s, and by the time it passes the 7-Eleven, there must be eighty vehicles or more, and maybe two hundred and fifty people. Credit this unnaturally rapid swelling to the ubiquitous cell phone.