Firestarter (17 page)

“Can I, Daddy?”

“I guess so,” Andy said, mentally surrendering. Somehow they had gone out beside the road to thumb a ride and had got shanghaied instead.

“Come on in and meet the wife.”

They strolled across the dooryard, pausing for Charlie to examine as many of the chickens as she could get close to. The back door opened and a woman of about forty-five came out onto the back steps. She shaded her eyes and called,
“You there, Irv! Who you brought home?”

Irv smiled. “Well, the button here is Roberta. This fellow is her daddy. I didn't catch his name yet, so I dunno if we're related.”

Andy stepped forward and said, “I'm Frank Burton, ma'am. Your husband invited Bobbi and me home for lunch, if that's all right. We're pleased to know you.”

“Me too,” Charlie said, still more interested in the chickens than in the woman—at least for the moment.

“I'm Norma Manders,” she said. “Come in. You're welcome.” But Andy saw the puzzled look she threw at her husband.

They all went inside, through an entryway where stove-lengths were stacked head high and into a huge kitchen that was dominated by a woodstove and a long table covered with red and white checked oilcloth. There was an elusive smell of fruit and paraffin in the air. The smell of canning, Andy thought.

“Frank here and his button are on their way to Vermont,” Irv said. “I thought it wouldn't hurt em to get outside of a little hot food on their way.”

“Of course not,” she agreed. “Where is your car, Mr. Burton?”

“Well—” Andy began. He glanced at Charlie, but she was going to be no help; she was walking around the kitchen in small steps, looking at everything with a child's frank curiosity.

“Frank's had a little trouble,” Irv said, looking directly at his wife. “But we don't have to talk about that. At least, not right now.”

“All right,” Norma said. She had a sweet and direct face—a handsome woman who was used to working hard. Her hands were red and chapped. “I've got chicken and I could put together a nice salad. And there's lots of milk. Do you like milk, Roberta?”

Charlie didn't look around. She's lapsed on the name, Andy thought. Oh, Jesus, this just gets better and better.

“Bobbi!” he said loudly.

She looked around then, and smiled a little too widely. “Oh, sure,” she said. “I love milk.”

Andy saw a warning glance pass from Irv to his wife:
No questions, not now
. He felt a sinking despair. Whatever had been left of their story had just gone swirling away. But there
was nothing to do except sit down to lunch and wait to see what Irv Manders had on his mind.

“How far from the motel are we?” John Mayo asked.

Ray glanced down at the odometer. “Seventeen miles,” he said, and pulled over. “That's far enough.”

“But maybe—”

“No, if we were going to catch them, we would have by now. We'll go on back and rendezvous with the others.”

John struck the heel of his hand against the dashboard. “They turned off somewhere,” he said. “That goddam flat shoe! This job's been bad luck from the start, Ray. An egghead and a little girl. And we keep missing them.”

“No, I think we've got them,” Ray said, and took out his walkie-talkie. He pulled the antenna and tipped it out the window. “We'll have a cordon around the whole area in half an hour. And I bet we don't hit a dozen houses before someone around here recognizes that truck. Late-sixties dark-green International Harvester, snowplow attachment on the front, wooden stakes around the truck bed to hold on a high load. I still think we'll have them by dark.”

A moment later he was talking to Al Steinowitz, who was nearing the Slumberland Motel. Al briefed his agents in turn. Bruce Cook remembered the farm truck from town. OJ did, too. It had been parked in front of the A&P.

Al sent them back to town, and half an hour later they all knew that the truck that had almost certainly stopped to give the two fugitives a lift belonged to Irving Manders, RFD #5, Baillings Road, Hastings Glen, New York.

It was just past twelve-thirty
P.M.

The lunch was very nice. Charlie ate like a horse—three helpings of chicken with gravy, two of Norma Manders's hot biscuits, a side dish of salad, and three of her home-canned dill pickles. They finished off with slices of apple pie garnished with wedges of cheddar—Irv offering his opinion that
“Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze.” This earned him an affectionate elbow in the side from his wife. Irv rolled his eyes, and Charlie laughed. Andy's appetite surprised him. Charlie belched and then covered her mouth guiltily.

Irv smiled at her. “More room out than there is in, button.”

“If I eat any more, I think I'll split,” Charlie answered. “That's what my mother always used to … I mean, that's what she always says.”

Andy smiled tiredly.

“Norma,” Irv said, getting up, “why don't you and Bobbi go on out and feed those chickens?”

“Well, lunch is still spread over half an acre,” Norma said.

“I'll pick up lunch,” Irv said. “Want to have a little talk with Frank, here.”

“Would you like to feed the chickens, honey?” Norma asked Charlie.

“I sure would.” Her eyes were sparkling.

“Well, come on then. Do you have a jacket? It's turned a bit chilly.”

“Uh …” Charlie looked at Andy.

“You can borrow a sweater of mine,” Norma said. That look passed between her and Irv again. “Roll the sleeves up a little bit and it will be fine.”

“Okay.”

Norma got an old and faded warmup jacket from the entryway and a frayed white sweater that Charlie floated in, even with the cuffs turned up three or four times.

“Do they peck?” Charlie asked a little nervously.

“Only their food, honey.”

They went out and the door closed behind them. Charlie was still chattering. Andy looked at Irv Manders, and Irv looked back calmly.

“You want a beer, Frank?”

“It isn't Frank,” Andy said. “I guess you know that.”

“I guess I do. What is your handle?”

Andy said, “The less you know, the better off you are.”

“Well, then,” Irv said, “I'll just call you Frank.”

Faintly, they heard Charlie squeal with delight from outside. Norma said something, and Charlie agreed.

“I guess I could use a beer,” Andy said.

“Okay.”

Irv got two Utica Clubs from the refrigerator, opened
them, set Andy's on the table and his on the counter. He got an apron from a hook by the sink and put it on. The apron was red and yellow and the hem was flounced, but somehow he managed to avoid looking silly.

“Can I help you?” Andy asked.

“No, I know where everything goes,” Irv said. “Most everything, anyhow. She changes things from week to week. No woman wants a man to feel right at home in her kitchen. They like help, sure, but they feel better if you have to ask them where to put the casserole dish or where they put the Brillo.”

Andy, remembering his own days as Vicky's kitchen apprentice, smiled and nodded.

“Meddling around in other folk's business isn't my strong point,” Irv said, drawing water in the kitchen sink and adding detergent. “I'm a farmer, and like I told you, my wife runs a little curio shop down where Baillings Road crosses the Albany Highway. We've been here almost twenty years.”

He glanced back at Andy.

“But I knew there was somethin wrong from the minute I saw you two standing by the road back there. A grown man and a little girl just aren't the kind of pair you usually see hitching the roads. Know what I mean?”

Andy nodded and sipped his beer.

“Furthermore, it looked to me like you'd just come out of the Slumberland, but you had no traveling gear, not so much as an overnight case. So I just about decided to pass you by. Then I stopped. Because … well, there's a difference between not meddling in other folks' business and seeing something that looks damn bad and turning a blind eye to it.”

“Is that how we look to you? Damn bad?”

“Then,” Irv said, “not now.” He was washing the old mismatched dishes carefully, stacking them in the drainer. “Now I don't know just what to make of you two. My first thought was it must be you two the cops are looking for.” He saw the change come over Andy's face and the sudden way Andy set his beer can down. “I guess it is you,” he said softly. “I was hopin it wasn't.”

“What cops?” Andy asked harshly.

“They've got all the main roads blocked off coming in and out of Albany,” Irv said. “If we'd gone another six miles up Route Forty, we would have run on one of those blocks right where Forty crosses Route Nine.”

“Well, why didn't you just go ahead?” Andy asked. “That
would have been the end of it for you. You would have been out of it.”

Irv was starting on the pots now, pausing to hunt through the cupboards over the sink. “See what I was saying? I can't find the gloriosky Brillo.… What, here it is.… Why didn't I just take you up the road to the cops? Let's say I wanted to satisfy my own natural curiosity.”

“You have some questions, huh?”

“All kinds of them,” Irv said. “A grown man and a little girl hitching rides, the little girl hasn't got an overnight case, and the cops are after them. So I have an idea. It isn't so farfetched. I think that maybe here's a daddy who wanted custody of his button and couldn't get it. So he snatched her.”

“It sounds pretty farfetched to me.”

“Happens all the time, Frank. And I think to myself, the mommy didn't like that so well and swore out a warrant on the daddy. That would explain all the roadblocks. You only get coverage like that for a big robbery … or a kidnapping.”

“She's my daughter, but her mother didn't put the police on us,” Andy said. “Her mother has been dead for a year.”

“Well, I'd already kind of shitcanned the idea,” Irv said. “It don't take a private eye to see the two of you are pretty close. Whatever else may be going on, it doesn't appear you've got her against her will.”

Andy said nothing.

“So here we are at my problem,” Irv said. “I picked the two of you up because I thought the little girl might need help. Now I don't know where I'm at. You don't strike me as the desperado type. But all the same, you and your little girl are going under false names, you're telling a story that's just as thin as a piece of tissue paper, and you look sick, Frank. You look just about as sick as a man can get and still stay on his feet. So those are my questions. Any you could answer, it might be a good thing.”

“We came to Albany from New York and hitched a ride to Hastings Glen early this morning,” Andy said. “It's bad to know they're here, but I think I knew it. I think Charlie knew it, too.” He had mentioned Charlie's name, and that was a mistake, but at this point it didn't seem to matter.

“What do they want you for, Frank?”

Andy thought for a long time, and then he met Irv's frank gray eyes. He said: “You came from town, didn't you? See any strange people there? City types? Wearing these neat,
off-the-rack suits that you forget almost as soon as the guys wearing them are out of sight? Driving late-model cars that sort of just fade into the scenery?”

It was Irv's turn to think. “There were two guys like that in the A&P,” he said. “Talking to Helga. She's one of the checkers. Looked like they were showing her something.”

“Probably our picture,” Andy said. “They're government agents. They're working with the police, Irv. A more accurate way of putting it would be that the police are working for them. The cops don't know we're wanted.”

“What sort of government agency we talking about? FBI?”

“No. The Shop.”

“What? That CIA outfit?” Irv looked frankly disbelieving.

“They don't have anything at all to do with the CIA,” Andy said. The Shop is really the DSI—Department of Scientific Intelligence. I read in an article about three years ago that some wiseacre nicknamed it the Shop in the early sixties, after a science-fiction story called ‘The Weapon Shops of Ishtar.' By a guy named van Vogt, I think, but that doesn't matter. What they're supposed to be involved in are domestic scientific projects which may have present or future application to matters bearing on national security. That definition is from their charter, and the thing they're most associated with in the public mind is the energy research they're funding and supervising—electromagnetic stuff and fusion power. They're actually involved in a lot more. Charlie and I are part of an experiment that happened a long time ago. It happened before Charlie was even born. Her mother was also involved. She was murdered. The Shop was responsible.”

Irv was silent for a while. He let the dishwater out of the sink, dried his hands, and then came over and began to wipe the oilcloth that covered the table. Andy picked up his beer can.

“I won't say flat out that I don't believe you,” Irv said finally. “Not with some of the things that have gone on under cover in this country and then come out. CIA guys giving people drinks spiked with LSD and some FBI agent accused of killing people during the Civil Rights marches and money in brown bags and all of that. So I can't say right out that I don't believe you. Let's just say you haven't convinced me yet.”

“I don't think it's even me that they really want anymore,”
Andy said. “Maybe it was, once. But they've shifted targets. It's Charlie they're after now.”

“You mean the national government is after a first- or second-grader for reasons of national security?”

“Charlie's no ordinary second-grader,” Andy said. “Her mother and I were injected with a drug which was coded Lot Six. To this day I don't know exactly what it was. Some sort of synthetic glandular secretion would be my best guess. It changed the chromosomes of myself and of the lady I later married. We passed those chromosomes on to Charlie, and they mixed in some entirely new way. If she could pass them on to her children, I guess she'd be called a mutant. If for some reason she can't, or if the change has caused her to be sterile, I guess she'd be called a sport or a mule. Either way, they want her. They want to study her, see if they can figure out what makes her able to do what she can do. And even more, I think they want her as an exhibit. They want to use her to reactivate the Lot Six program.”