Firestarter (53 page)

But Charlie, Charlie!

They had been locked in a long waltz of death since that endless night of darkness during the power blackout. What he had only suspected that early morning in Washington when he had done Wanless had developed into an irrefutable certainty: the girl was his. But it would be an act of love, not of destruction, because the converse was almost certainly true as well.

It was acceptable. In many ways he wanted to die. And to
die at her hands, in her flames, would be an act of contrition … and possibly of absolution.

Once she and her father were together again, she would become a loaded gun … no, a loaded flamethrower.

He would watch her and he would let the two of them get together. What would happen then? Who knew?

And wouldn't knowing spoil the fun?

That night Rainbird went to Washington and found a hungry lawyer who worked late hours. To this lawyer he gave three hundred dollars in small bills. And in the lawyer's office, John Rainbird neatened his few affairs in order to be ready for the next day.

At six o'clock on Wednesday morning, Charlie McGee got up, took off her nightgown, and stepped into the shower. She washed her body and her hair, then turned the water to cold and stood shivering under the spray for a minute more. She toweled dry and then dressed carefully—cotton underpants, silk slip, dark-blue knee socks, her denim jumper. She finished by putting on her scuffed and comfortable loafers.

She hadn't thought she would be able to sleep at all last night; she had gone to bed full of fear and nervous excitement. But she had slept. And dreamed incessantly not of Necromancer and the run through the woods but of her mother. That was peculiar, because she didn't think of her mother as often as she used to; at times her face seemed misty and distant in her memory, like a faded photograph. But in her dreams of last night, her mother's face—her laughing eyes, her warm, generous mouth—had been so clear that Charlie might last have seen her just the day before.

Now, dressed and ready for the day, some of the unnatural lines of strain had gone out of her face and she seemed calm. On the wall beside the door leading into the kitchenette there was a call button and a speaker grille set into a brushed-chrome plate just below the light switch. She pressed the button now.

“Yes, Charlie?”

She knew the owner of the voice only as Mike. At seven o'clock—about half an hour from now—Mike went off and Louis came on.

“I want to go out to the stables this afternoon,” she said, “and see Necromancer. Will you tell someone?”

“I'll leave a note for Dr. Hockstetter, Charlie.”

“Thank you.” She paused, just for a moment. You got to
know their voices. Mike, Louis, Gary. You got pictures of how they must look in your mind, the way you got pictures of how the DJs you heard on the radio must look. You got to like them. She suddenly realized that she would almost certainly never talk to Mike again.

“Was there something else, Charlie?”

“No, Mike. Have … have a good day.”

“Why, thank you, Charlie.” Mike sounded both surprised and pleased. “You too.”

She turned on the TV and tuned to a cartoon show that came on every morning over the cable. Popeye was inhaling spinach through his pipe and getting ready to beat the sauce out of Bluto. One o'clock seemed an age away.

What if Dr. Hockstetter said she couldn't go out?

On the TV screen, they were showing a cutaway view of Popeye's muscles. There were about sixteen turbine engines in each one.

He better not say that. He better not. Because I'm going. One way or the other, I'm going.

Andy's rest hadn't been as easy or as healing as his daughter's. He had tossed and turned, sometimes dozing, then starting out of the doze just as it began to deepen because the terrible leading edge of some nightmare touched his mind. The only one he could remember was Charlie staggering down the aisle between the stalls in the stable, her head gone and red-blue flames spouting from her neck instead of blood.

He had meant to stay in bed until seven o'clock, but when the digital face of the clock beside the bed got to 6:15, he could wait no longer. He swung out and headed for the shower.

Last night at just past nine, Pynchot's former assistant, Dr. Nutter, had come in with Andy's walking papers. Nutter, a tall, balding man in his late fifties, was bumbling and avuncular. Sorry to be losing you; hope you enjoy your stay in Hawaii; wish I was going with you, ha-ha; please sign this.

The paper Nutter wanted him to sign was a list of his few personal effects (including his keyring, Andy noticed with a nostalgic pang). He would be expected to inventory them once in Hawaii and initial another sheet that said that they
had, indeed, been returned. They wanted him to sign a paper concerning his personal effects after they had murdered his wife, chased him and Charlie across half the country, and then kidnapped and held them prisoner: Andy found that darkly hilarious and Kafkaesque. I sure wouldn't want to lose any of those keys, he thought, scrawling his signature; I might need one of them to open a bottle of soda with sometime, right, fellows?

There was also a carbon of the Wednesday schedule, neatly initialed by Cap at the bottom of the page. They would be leaving at twelve-thirty, Cap picking Andy up at his quarters. He and Cap would proceed toward the eastern checkpoint, passing Parking Area C, where they would pick up an escort of two cars. They would then drive to Andrews and board the plane at approximately fifteen hundred hours. There would be one stop for refueling—at Durban Air Force Base, near Chicago.

All right,
Andy thought.
Okay
.

He dressed and began to move about the apartment, packing his clothes, shaving tackle, shoes, bedroom slippers. They had provided him with two Samsonite suitcases. He remembered to do it all slowly, moving with the careful concentration of a drugged man.

After he found out about Rainbird from Cap, his first thought had been a hope that he would meet him: it would be such a great pleasure to push the man who had shot Charlie with the tranquilizer dart and later betrayed her in even more terrible fashion, to put his gun to his temple and pull the trigger. But he no longer wanted to meet Rainbird. He wanted no surprises of any kind. The numb spots on his face had shrunk to pinpricks, but they were still there—a reminder that if he had to overuse the push, he would very likely kill himself.

He only wanted things to go off smoothly.

His few things were packed all too soon, leaving him with nothing to do but sit and wait. The thought that he would be seeing his daughter again soon was like a small coal of warmth in his brain.

To him too one o'clock seemed an age away.

Rainbird didn't sleep at all that night. He arrived back from Washington around five-thirty
A.M
., garaged his Cadillac, and sat at his kitchen table drinking cup after cup of coffee. He was waiting for a call from Andrews, and until that call came, he would not rest easy. It was still theoretically possible for Cap to have found out what he had done with the computer. McGee had messed up Cap Hollister pretty well, but it still did not pay to underestimate.

Around six-forty-five, the telephone rang. Rainbird set his coffee cup down, rose, went into the living room, and answered it. “Rainbird here.”

“Rainbird? This is Dick Folsom at Andrews. Major Puckeridge's aide.”

“You woke me up, man,” Rainbird said. “I hope you catch crabs as big as orange crates. That's an old Indian curse.”

“You've been scrubbed,” Folsom said. “I guess you knew.”

“Yes, Cap called me himself last night.”

“I'm sorry,” Folsom said. “It's standard operating procedure, that's all.”

“Well, you operated in standard fashion. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“Yeah. I envy you.”

Rainbird uttered the obligatory chuckle and hung up. He went back into the kitchen, picked up his coffee cup, went to the window, looked out, saw nothing.

Floating dreamily through his mind was the Prayer for the Dead.

Cap did not arrive in his office that morning until almost ten-thirty, an hour and a half later than usual. He had searched his small Vega from stem to stern before leaving the house. He had become sure during the night that the car was infested with snakes. The search had taken him twenty minutes—the need to make sure there were no rattlers or copperheads (or something even more sinister and exotic)
nesting in the darkness of the trunk, dozing on the fugitive warmth of the engine block, curled up in the glove compartment. He had pushed the glove-compartment button with a broomhandle, not wanting to be too close in case some hissing horror should leap out at him, and when a map of Virginia tumbled out of the square hole in the dash, he had nearly screamed.

Then, halfway to the Shop, he had passed the Greenway Golf Course and had pulled over onto the shoulder to watch with a dreamy sort of concentration as the golfers played through the eighth and ninth. Every time one of them sliced into the rough, he was barely able to restrain a compulsion to step out of the car and yell for them to beware of snakes in the tall grass.

At last the blare of a ten-wheeler's airhorn (he had parked with his lefthand wheels still on the pavement) had startled him out of his daze and he drove on.

His secretary greeted him with a pile of overnight telex cables, which Cap simply took without bothering to shuffle through them to see if there was anything hot enough to demand immediate attention. The girl at the desk was going over a number of requests and messages when she suddenly looked up at Cap curiously. Cap was paying no attention to her at all. He was gazing at the wide drawer near the top of her desk with a bemused expression on his face.

“Pardon me,” she said. She was still very much aware of being the new girl, even after all these months, of having replaced someone Cap had been close to. And perhaps had been sleeping with, she had sometimes speculated.

“Hmmmm?” He looked around at her at last. But the blankness did not leave his eyes. It was somehow shocking … like looking at the shuttered windows of a house reputed to be haunted.

She hesitated, then plunged. “Cap, do you feel all right? You look … well, a little white.”

“I feel fine,” he said, and for a moment he was his old self, dispelling some of her doubts. His shoulders squared, his head came up, and the blankness left his eyes. “Anybody who's going to Hawaii ought to feel fine, right?”

“Hawaii?” Gloria said doubtfully. It was news to her.

“Never mind these now,” Cap said, taking the message forms and interdepartmental memos and stuffing them all together with the telex cables. “I'll look at them later. Anything happening with either of the McGees?”

“One item,” she said. “I was just getting to it. Mike Kellaher says she asked to go out to the stable this afternoon and see a horse—”

“Yes, that's fine,” Cap said.

“—and she buzzed back a little later to say she'd like to go out at quarter of one.”

“Fine, fine.”

“Will Mr. Rainbird be taking her out?”

“Rainbird's on his way to San Diego,” Cap said with unmistakable satisfaction. “I'll send a man to take her over.”

“All right. Will you want to see the …” She trailed off. Cap's eyes had wandered away from her and he appeared to be staring at the wide drawer again. It was partway open. It always was, per regulations. There was a gun in there. Gloria was a crack shot, just as Rachel before her had been.

“Cap, are you sure there's nothing wrong?”

“Ought to keep that shut,” Cap said. “They like dark places. They like to crawl in and hide.”

“They?” she asked cautiously.

“Snakes,” Cap said, and marched into his office.

He sat behind his desk, the cables and messages in an untidy litter before him. They were forgotten. Everything was forgotten now except snakes, golf clubs, and what he was going to do at quarter of one. He would go down and see Andy McGee. He felt strongly that Andy would tell him what to do next. He felt strongly that Andy would make everything all right.

Beyond quarter of one this afternoon, everything in his life was a great funneling darkness.

He didn't mind. It was sort of a relief.

At quarter of ten, John Rainbird slipped into the small monitoring room near Charlie's quarters. Louis Tranter, a hugely fat man whose buttocks nearly overflowed the chair he sat in, was watching the monitors. The digital
thermometer read a steady sixty-eight degrees. He looked over his shoulder when the door opened and his face tightened at the sight of Rainbird.

“I heard you were leaving town,” he said.

“Scrubbed,” Rainbird said. “And you never saw me this morning at all, Louis.”

Louis looked at him doubtfully.

“You never saw me,” Rainbird repeated. “After five this afternoon I don't give a shit. But until then, you never saw me. And if I hear you did, I'm going to come after you and cut me some blubber. Can you dig it?”

Louis Tranter paled noticeably. The Hostess Twinkie he had been eating dropped from his hand onto the slanted steel panel that housed the TV monitors and microphone pickup controls. It rolled down the slant and tumbled to the floor unheeded, leaving a trail of crumbs behind. Suddenly he wasn't a bit hungry. He had heard this guy was crazy, and now he was seeing that what he had heard was certainly true.

“I can dig it,” he said, whispering in the face of that weird grin and glittering one-eyed stare.

“Good,” Rainbird said, and advanced toward him. Louis shrank away from him, but Rainbird ignored him altogether for the moment and peered into one of the monitors. There was Charlie, looking pretty as a picture in her blue jumper. With a lover's eye, Rainbird noted that she had not braided her hair today; it lay loose and fine and lovely over her neck and shoulders. She wasn't doing anything but sitting on the sofa. No book. No TV. She looked like a woman waiting for a bus.