Black House (44 page)

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 fuck 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.

Teddy Runkleman, oddly silent (he is, in fact, afraid of the pallid woman sitting beside him—her snarling mouth and her wide, unblinking eyes), brings his old truck to a halt in front of the FLPD parking lot entrance. Sumner Street is steep here, and he sets the parking brake. The other vehicles halt behind him, filling the street from side to side, rumbling through rusty mufflers and blatting through broken exhaust pipes. Misaligned headlights stab the fog like searchlight beams at a movie premiere. The night’s dank wet-fish smell has been overlaid with odors of burning gas, boiling oil, and cooking clutch lining. After a moment, doors begin to open and then clap shut. But there is no conversation. No yelling. No indecorous
yee-haw
whooping. Not tonight. The newcomers stand in clusters around the vehicles that brought them, watching as the people in the back of Teddy’s truck either jump over the sides or slip off the end of the tailgate, watching as Teddy crosses to the passenger door, at this moment as attentive as a young man arriving with his date at the junior prom, watching as he helps down the slim young woman who has lost her daughter. The mist seems to outline her somehow, and give her a bizarre electric aura, the same blue of the sodium lights on Beezer’s upper arms. The crowd gives out a collective (and weirdly amorous) sigh when it sees her. She is what connects them. All her life, Tansy Freneau has been the forgotten one—even Cubby Freneau forgot her eventually, running off to Green Bay and leaving her here to work odd jobs and collect the ADC. Only Irma remembered her, only Irma cared, and now Irma is dead. Not here to see (unless she’s looking down from heaven, Tansy thinks in some distant and ever-receding part of her mind) her mother suddenly idolized. Tansy Freneau has tonight become the dearest subject of French Landing’s eye and heart. Not its mind, because its mind is temporarily gone (perhaps in search of its conscience), but certainly of its eye and heart, yes. And now, as delicately as the girl she once was, Doodles Sanger approaches this woman of the hour. What Doodles spotted lying on the floor of Teddy’s truck bed was an old length of rope, dirty and oily but thick enough to do the trick. Below Doodles’s petite fist hangs the noose that her clever hands have fashioned on the ride into town. She hands it to Tansy, who holds it up in the misty light.

The crowd lets out another sigh.

Noose raised, looking like a female Diogenes in search of an hon-est man rather than of a cannibal in need of lynching, Tansy walks—delicate herself in her jeans and bloodstained sweatshirt—into the parking lot. Teddy, Doodles, and Freddy Saknessum walk behind her, and behind them come the rest. They move toward the police station like the tide.

The Thunder Five are still standing with their backs to the brick wall and their arms folded. “What the fuck do we do?” Mouse asks.

“I don’t know about you,” Beezer says, “but I’m gonna stand here until they grab me, which they probably will.” He’s looking at the woman with the upraised noose. He’s a big boy and he’s been in a lot of hard corners, but this chick frightens him with her blank, wide eyes, like the eyes of a statue. And there’s something stuck in her belt. Something black. Is it a knife? Some kind of dagger? “And I’m not gonna fight, because it won’t work.”

“They’ll lock the door, right?” Doc asks nervously. “I mean, the cops’ll lock the door.”

“I imagine,” Beezer says, never taking his eyes from Tansy Freneau. “But if these folks want Potter, they’ll have him on the half shell.
Look
at ’em, for Christ’s sake. There’s a couple of hundred.”

Tansy stops, the noose still held up. “Bring him out,” she says. Her voice is louder than it should be, as if some doctor has cunningly hidden an amplifying gadget in her throat. “Bring him out. Give us the killer!”

Doodles joins in. “Bring him out!”

And Teddy.
“Give us the killer!”

And Freddy.
“Bring him out! Give us the killer!”

And then the rest. It could almost be the sound track of George Rathbun’s
Badger Barrage,
only instead of
“Block that kick!”
or
“On Wisconsin!”
they are screaming,
“BRING HIM OUT! GIVE US THE KILLER!”

“They’re gonna take him,” Beezer murmurs. He turns to his troops, his eyes both fierce and frightened. Sweat stands out on his broad forehead in large perfect drops. “When she’s got ’em pumped up to high, she’ll come and they’ll be right on her ass. Don’t run, don’t even unfold your arms. And when they grab you, let it happen. If you want to see daylight tomorrow,
let it happen.
”

The crowd stands knee-deep in fog like spoiled skim milk, chanting,
“BRING HIM OUT! GIVE US THE KILLER!”

Wendell Green is chanting right along with them, but that doesn’t keep him from continuing to take pictures.

Because shit, this is the story of a lifetime.

From the door behind Beezer, there’s a click.
Yeah, they locked it,
he thinks.
Thanks, you whores.

But it’s the latch, not the lock. The door opens. Jack Sawyer steps out. He walks past Beezer without looking or reacting as Beez mutters, “Hey, man, I wouldn’t go near her.”

Jack advances slowly but not hesitantly into the no-man’s-land between the building and the mob with the woman standing at its head, Lady Liberty with the upraised hangman’s noose instead of a torch in her hand. In his simple gray collarless shirt and dark pants, Jack looks like a cavalier from some old romantic tale advancing to propose marriage. The flowers he holds in his own hand add to this impression. These tiny white blooms are what Speedy left for him beside the sink in Dale’s bathroom, a cluster of impossibly fragrant white blossoms.

They are lilies of the vale, and they are from the Territories. Speedy left him no explanation about how to use them, but Jack needs none.

The crowd falls silent. Only Tansy, lost in the world Gorg has made for her, continues to chant:
“Bring him out! Give us the killer!”
She doesn’t stop until Jack is directly in front of her, and he doesn’t kid himself that it’s his handsome face or dashing figure that ends the too loud repetition. It is the smell of the flowers, their sweet and vibrant smell the exact opposite of the meaty stench that hung over Ed’s Eats.

Her eyes clear . . . a little, at least.

“Bring him out,” she says to Jack. Almost a question.

“No,” he says, and the word is filled with heartbreaking tenderness. “No, dear.”

Behind them, Doodles Sanger suddenly thinks of her father for the first time in maybe twenty years and begins to weep.

“Bring him out,” Tansy pleads. Now her own eyes are filling. “Bring out the monster who killed my pretty baby.”

“If I had him, maybe I would,” Jack says. “Maybe I would at that.” Although he knows better. “But the guy we’ve got’s not the guy you want. He’s not the one.”

“But Gorg said—”

Here is a word he knows. One of the words Judy Marshall tried to eat. Jack, not in the Territories but not entirely in this world right now either, reaches forward and plucks the feather from her belt. “Did Gorg give you this?”

“Yes—”

Jack lets it drop, then steps on it. For a moment he thinks
—knows—
that he feels it buzzing angrily beneath the sole of his shoe, like a half-crushed wasp. Then it stills. “Gorg lies, Tansy. Whatever Gorg is, he lies. The man in there is not the one.”

Tansy lets out a great wail and drops the rope. Behind her, the crowd sighs.

Jack puts his arm around her and again he thinks of George Potter’s painful dignity; he thinks of all the lost, struggling along without a single clean Territories dawn to light their way. He hugs her to him, smelling sweat and grief and madness and coffee brandy.

In her ear, Jack whispers: “I’ll catch him for you, Tansy.”

She stiffens. “You . . .”

“Yes.”

“You . . . promise?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not the one?”

“No, dear.”

“You swear?”

Jack hands her the lilies and says, “On my mother’s name.”

She lowers her nose to the flowers and inhales deeply. When her head comes up again, Jack sees that the danger has left her, but not the insanity. She’s one of the lost ones now. Something has gotten to her. Maybe if the Fisherman is caught, it will leave her. Jack would like to believe that.

“Someone needs to take this lady home,” Jack says. He speaks in a mild, conversational voice, but it still carries to the crowd. “She’s very tired and full of sadness.”

“I’ll do it,” Doodles says. Her cheeks gleam with tears. “I’ll take her in Teddy’s truck, and if he don’t give me the keys, I’ll knock him down. I—”

And that’s when the chant starts again, this time from back in the crowd:
“Bring him out! Give us the killer! Give us the Fisherman! Bring out the Fisherman!”
For a moment it’s a solo job, and then a few other hesitant voices begin to join in and lend harmony.

Still standing with his back against the bricks, Beezer St. Pierre says: “Ah, shit. Here we go again.”

Jack forbade Dale to come out into the parking lot with him, saying that the sight of Dale’s uniform might set off the crowd. He didn’t mention the little bouquet of flowers he was holding, and Dale barely noticed them; he was too terrified of losing Potter to Wisconsin’s first lynching of the new millennium. He followed Jack downstairs, however, and has now commandeered the peephole in the door by right of seniority.

The rest of the FLPD is still upstairs, looking out of the ready-room windows. Henry has ordered Bobby Dulac to give him a running play-by-play. Even in his current state of worry about Jack (Henry thinks there’s at least a 40 percent chance the mob will either trample him or tear him apart), Henry is amused and flattered to realize that Bobby is doing George Rathbun without even realizing it.

“Okay, Hollywood’s out there . . . he approaches the woman . . . no sign of fear . . . the rest of them are quiet . . . Jack and the woman appear to be talking . . . and holy jeezum, he’s givin’ her a bouquet of flowers! What a ploy!”

“Ploy” is one of George Rathbun’s favorite sports terms, as in
The Brew Crew’s hit-and-run ploy failed yet again last night at Miller Park.

“She’s
turnin’ away!
” Bobby yells jubilantly. He grabs Henry’s shoulder and shakes it. “Hot damn, I think it’s over!
I think Jack turned her off!
”

“Even a blind man could see he turned her off,” Henry says.

“Just in time, too,” Bobby says. “Here’s Channel Five and there’s another truck with one of those big orange poles on it . . . Fox-Milwaukee, I think . . . and—”

“Bring him out!”
a voice outside begins yelling. It sounds cheated and indignant.
“Give us the killer! Give us the Fisherman!”

“Oh nooo!” Bobby says, even now sounding like George Rathbun, telling his morning-after audience how another Badger rally had started to fizzle. “Not nowwww, not with the TV here! That’s—”

“Bring out the Fisherman!”

Henry already knows who that is. Even through two layers of chicken-wire-reinforced glass, that high, yapping cry is impossible to mistake.

Wendell Green understands his job—don’t ever make the mistake of thinking he doesn’t. His job is to
report
the news, to
analyze
the news, to sometimes
photojournalize
the news. His job is not to
make
the news. But tonight he can’t help it. This is the second time in the last twelve hours that a career maker of a story has been extended to his grasping, pleading hands, only to be snatched away at the last second.

“Bring him out!”
Wendell bawls. The raw strength in his voice surprises, then thrills him
“Give us the killer! Give us the Fisherman!”

The sound of other voices joining in with his provides an incredible rush. It is, as his old college roommate used to say, a real zipper buster. Wendell takes a step forward, his chest swelling, his cheeks reddening, his confidence building. He’s vaguely aware that the Action News Five truck is rolling slowly toward him through the crowd. Soon there will be 10-k’s and 5-k’s shining through the fog; soon there will be TV cameras rolling tape by their harsh light. So what? If the woman in the blood-spattered sweatshirt was in the end too chicken to stand up for her own kid, Wendell will do it for her! Wendell Green, shining exemplar of civic responsibility! Wendell Green,
leader of the people!