Black House (Page 166)

"And where is Burnside now? That information might speed things up a bit."

"I don’t know," Parkus says.

"Christ, if you know who he was — "

"That was the fingerprints," Parkus says. "The fingerprints on the telephone. Your first real idea about the case. The Wisconsin State Police got the Bierstone name back from the FBI’s VICAP database. You have the Burnside name. That should be enough."

Wisconsin State Police, FBI, VICAP, database: these terms come out in good old American English, and in this place they sound unpleasant and foreign to Jack’s ear.

"How do you know all that?"

"I have my sources in your world; I keep my ear to the ground. As you know from personal experience. And surely you’re cop enough to do the rest on your own."

"Judy thinks you have a friend who can help," Sophie says unexpectedly.

"Dale? Dale Gilbertson?" Jack finds this a little hard to believe, but he supposes Dale may have uncovered something.

"I don’t know the name. Judy thinks he’s like many here in Faraway. A man who sees much because he sees nothing."

Not Dale, after all. It’s Henry she’s talking about.

Parkus rises to his feet. The heads of the parrot come up, revealing four bright eyes. Sacred and Profane flutters up to his shoulder and settles there. "I think our palaver is done," Parkus says. "It must be done. Are you ready to go back, my friend?"

"Yes. And I suppose I better take Green, little as I want to. I don’t think he’d last long here."

"As you say."

Jack and Sophie, still holding hands, are halfway up the rise when Jack realizes Parkus is still standing in the speaking circle with his parrot on his shoulder. "Aren’t you coming?"

Parkus shakes his head. "We go different ways now, Jack. I may see you again."

If I survive, Jack thinks. If any of us survive.

"Meantime, go your course. And be true."

Sophie drops another deep curtsey. "Sai."

Parkus nods to her and gives Jack Sawyer a little salute. Jack turns and leads Sophie back to the ruined hospital tent, wondering if he will ever see Speedy Parker again.

Wendell Green — ace reporter, fearless investigator, explicator of good and evil to the great unwashed — sits in his former place, holding the crumpled foolscap in one hand and the batteries in the other. He has resumed muttering, and barely looks up when Sophie and Jack approach.

"You’ll do your best, won’t you?" Sophie asks. "For her."

"And for you," Jack says. "Listen to me, now. If this were to end with all of us still standing . . . and if I were to come back here . . ." He finds he can say no more. He’s appalled at his temerity. This is a queen, after all. A queen. And he’s . . . what? Trying to ask her for a date?

"Perhaps," she says, looking at him with her steady blue eyes. "Perhaps."

"Is it a perhaps you want?" he asks softly.

"Yes."

He bends and brushes his lips over hers. It’s brief, barely a kiss at all. It is also the best kiss of his life.

"I feel like fainting," she tells him when he straightens up again.

"Don’t joke with me, Sophie."

She takes his hand and presses it against the underswell of her left breast. He can feel her heart pounding. "Is this a joke? If she were to run faster, she’d catch her feet and fall." She lets him go, but he holds his hand where it is a moment longer, palm curved against that springing warmth.

"I’d come with you if I could," she says.

"I know that."

He looks at her, knowing if he doesn’t get moving now, right away, he never will. It’s wanting not to leave her, but that’s not all. The truth is that he’s never been more frightened in his life. He searches for something mundane to bring him back to earth — to slow the pounding of his own heart — and finds the perfect object in the muttering creature that is Wendell Green. He drops to one knee. "Are you ready, big boy? Want to take a trip on the mighty Mississip’?"

"Don’t. Touch. Me." And then, in a nearly poetic rush: "Fucking Hollywood ass**le!"

"Believe me, if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t. And I plan to wash my hands just as soon as I get the chance."

He looks up at Sophie and sees all the Judy in her. All the beauty in her. "I love you," he says.

Before she can reply, he seizes Wendell’s hand, closes his eyes, and flips.

22

THIS TIME THERE’S something that isn’t quite silence: a lovely white rushing he has heard once before. In the summer of 1997, Jack went up way north to Vacaville with an LAPD skydiving club called the P.F. Flyers. It was a dare, one of those stupid things you got yourself into as a result of too many beers too late at night and then couldn’t get yourself out of again. Not with any grace. Which was to say, not without looking like a chickenshit. He expected to be frightened; instead, he was exalted. Yet he had never done it again, and now he knows why: he had come too close to remembering, and some frightened part of him must have known it. It was the sound before you pulled the ripcord — that lonely white rushing of the wind past your ears. Nothing else to hear but the soft, rapid beat of your heart and — maybe — the click in your ears as you swallowed saliva that was in free fall, just like the rest of you.

Pull the ripcord, Jack, he thinks. Time to pull the ripcord, or the landing’s going to be awfully damn hard.

Now there’s a new sound, low at first but quickly swelling to a tooth-rattling bray. Fire alarm, he thinks, and then: No, it’s a symphony of fire alarms. At the same moment, Wendell Green’s hand is snatched out of his grip. He hears a faint, squawking cry as his fellow sky diver is swept away, and then there’s a smell —