The Bad Place (26 page)

“They’re some pair, the Dakotas,” he said. “When you first meet them, they seem so dissimilar in some ways, you figure they can’t possibly work well together. But then you get to know them, you see how they fit like two pieces of a puzzle, and you realize they’ve got a nearly perfect relationship.”

Felina put down her soup spoon and signed: So do we.

“We sure do.”

“We sure do,” he agreed, smiling. Then he picked up on the sly sexual connotation of what she’d said, and he laughed. “You’re a filthy-minded wench, aren’t you?”

She grinned and nodded.

“Plug and socket, huh?”

“Later on, I’ll check your wiring.”

Thunder cracked and clattered across the night outside, and a sudden gust of wind rattled the rain against the window. The sounds of the storm made the warm and aromatic kitchen even more inviting by comparison. Clint sighed with contentment, then was touched by a brief sadness when he realized that the deeply satisfying sense of shelter, induced by the sounds of thunder and rain, was a specific pleasure that Felina could never experience or share with him.

From his pants pocket he withdrew one of the red gems that Frank Pollard had brought to the office. “I borrowed this one ’cause I wanted you to see it. The guy had a jarful of them.”

She pinched the grape-sized stone between thumb and index finger and held it up to the light.
Beautiful,
she signed with her free hand. She put the gem beside her soup bowl, on the cream-white Formica surface of the kitchen table.
Is it very valuable?

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ll get an opinion from a gemologist tomorrow.”

The stone took in the kitchen light, bounced it from prism to prism, and cast it back with a bright tint, painting Felina’s face with luminous crimson spots and smears. She seemed to be spattered with blood.

A queer foreboding overtook Clint.

She signed,
What’re you frowning about?

He didn’t know what to say. His uneasiness was out of proportion to the cause of it. A cold prickling swiftly progressed from the base of his spine all the way to the back of his neck, as if dominoes of ice were falling in a row. He reached out and moved the gem a few inches, so the blood-red reflections fell on the wall beside Felina instead of on her face.

BY ONE-THIRTY in the morning, Hal Yamataka was thoroughly hooked by the John D. MacDonald novel,
The Last One Left.
The room’s only chair wasn’t the most comfortable seat he’d ever parked his butt in, and the antiseptic smell of the hospital always made him a bit queasy, and the chile rellenos he’d eaten for dinner were still coming back on him, but the book was so involving that eventually he forgot all of those minor discomforts.

He even forgot Frank Pollard for a while, until he heard a brief hiss, like air escaping under pressure, and felt a sudden draft. He looked away from the book, expecting to see Pollard sitting up in the bed or trying to get out of it, but Pollard was not there.

Startled, Hal sprang up, dropping the book.

The bed was empty. Pollard had been there all night, asleep for the last hour, but now he was gone. The place was not brightly lighted because the fluorescents behind the bed were turned off, but the shadows beyond the reading lamp were too shallow to conceal a man. The sheets were not tossed aside but were draped neatly across the mattress, and both of the side railings were locked in place, as if Frank Pollard had evaporated like a figure carved from Dry Ice.

Hal was certain that he would have heard Pollard lower one of the railings, get out of bed, then lift the railing into place again. Surely he would have heard Pollard climbing over it too.

The window was closed. Rain washed down the glass, glimmering with silvery reflections of the room’s light. They were on the sixth floor, and Pollard could not escape by the window, yet Hal checked it, noting that it was not merely closed but locked.

Stepping to the door of the adjoining bathroom, he said, “Frank?” When no one answered, he entered. The bath was deserted.

Only the narrow closet remained as a viable hiding place. Hal opened it and found two hangers that held the clothes Pollard had been wearing when he’d checked into the hospital. The man’s shoes were there, too, with his socks neatly rolled and tucked into them.

“He can’t have gotten past me and into the hall,” Hal said, as if giving voice to that contention would magically make it true.

He pulled open the heavy door and rushed into the corridor. No one was in sight in either direction.

He turned to the left, hurried to the emergency exit at the end of the hall, and opened the door. Standing on the sixth-floor landing, he listened for footsteps rising or descending, heard none, peered over the iron railing, down into the well, then up. He was alone.

Retracing his steps, he returned to Pollard’s room and glanced inside at the empty bed. Still disbelieving, he proceeded to the junction of corridors, where he turned right and went to the glass-walled nurses’ station.

None of the five night-shift nurses had seen Pollard on the move. Since the elevators were directly opposite the nurses’ station, where Pollard would have had to wait in full view of the people on duty, it seemed unlikely that he had left the hospital by that route.

“I thought you were watching over him,” said Grace Fulgham, the gray-haired supervisor of the sixth-floor night staff. Her solid build, indomitable manner, and life-worn but kind face would have made her perfect for the female lead if Hollywood ever started remaking the old Tugboat Annie or Ma and Pa Kettle movies. “Wasn’t that your job?”

“I never left the room, but—”

“Then how did he get past you?”

“I don’t know,” Hal said, chagrined. “But the important thing is ... he’s suffering from partial amnesia, somewhat confused. He might wander off anywhere, out of the hospital, God knows where. I can’t figure how he got past me, but we have to find him.”

Mrs. Fulgham and a younger nurse named Janet Soto began a swift and quiet inspection of all the rooms along Pollard’s corridor.

Hal accompanied Nurse Fulgham. As they were checking out 604, where two elderly men snored softly, he heard eerie music, barely audible. As he turned, seeking the source, the notes faded away.

If Nurse Fulgham heard the music, she did not remark on it. A moment later in the next room, 606, when those strains arose once more, marginally louder than before, she whispered, “What is that?”

To Hal it sounded like a flute. The unseen flautist produced no discernible melody, but the flow of notes was haunting nonetheless.

They reentered the hall as the music stopped again, and just as a draft swept along the corridor.

“Someone’s left a window open—or probably a stairway door,” the nurse said quietly but pointedly.

“Not me,” Hal assured her.

Janet Soto stepped out of the room across the hall just as the blustery draft abruptly died. She frowned at them, shrugged, then headed toward the next room on her side.

The flute warbled softly. The draft struck up again, stronger than before, and beneath the astringent odors of the hospital, Hal thought he detected a faint scent of smoke.

Leaving Grace Fulgham to her search, Hal hurried toward the far end of the corridor. He intended to check the door at the head of the emergency stairs, to make sure that he hadn’t left it open.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the door to Pollard’s room beginning to swing shut, and he realized that the draft must be coming from in there. He pushed through the door before it could close, and saw Frank sitting up in bed, looking confused and frightened.

The draft and flute had given way to stillness, silence.

“Where did you go?” Hal asked, approaching the bed.

“Fireflies,” Pollard said, apparently dazed. His hair was spiked and tangled, and his round face was pale.

“Fireflies?”

“Fireflies in a windstorm,” Pollard said.

Then he vanished. One second he was sitting in bed, as real and solid as anyone Hal had ever known, and the next second he was gone as inexplicably and neatly as a ghost abandoning a haunt. A brief hiss, like air escaping from a punctured tire, accompanied his departure.

Hal swayed as if he had been stricken. For a moment his heart seemed to seize up, and he was paralyzed by surprise.

Nurse Fulgham stepped into the doorway. “No sign of him in any of the rooms off this corridor. He might’ve gone up or down another floor—don’t you think?”

“Uh....”

“Before we check out the rest of this level, maybe I’d better call security and get them moving on a search of the entire hospital. Mr. Yamataka?”

Hal glanced at her, then back at the empty bed. “Uh ... yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea. He might wander off to ... God knows where.”

Nurse Fulgham hurried away.

Weak-kneed, Hal went to the door, closed it, put his back against it, and stared at the bed across the room. After a while he said, “Are you there, Frank?”

He received no answer. He had not expected one. Frank Pollard had not turned invisible; he had
gone
somewhere, somehow.

Not sure why he was less wonderstruck than frightened by what he had seen, Hal hesitantly crossed the room to the bed. He gingerly touched the stainless-steel railing, as if he thought that Pollard’s vanishing act had tapped some elemental force, leaving a deadly residual current in the bed. But no sparks crackled under his fingertips; the metal was cool and smooth.

He waited, wondering how soon Pollard would reappear, wondering if he ought to call Bobby now or wait until Pollard materialized, wondering if the man
would
materialize again or disappear forever. For the first time in memory, Hal Yamataka was gripped by indecision; he was ordinarily a quick thinker, and quick to act, but he had never come face to face with the supernatural before.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he must not let Fulgham or Soto or anyone else in the hospital know what had really happened. Pollard was caught up in a phenomenon so strange that word of it would spread quickly from the hospital staff to the press. Protecting a client’s privacy was always one of Dakota & Dakota’s prime objectives, but in this case it was even more important than usual. Bobby and Julie had said that someone was hunting for Pollard, evidently with violent intentions ; therefore, keeping the press out of the case might be essential if the client was to survive.

The door opened, and Hal jumped as if he’d been stuck with a hatpin.

In the doorway stood Grace Fulgham, looking as if she had just either guided a tugboat through stormy seas or chopped and carried a couple of cords of firewood that Pa had been too lazy to deal with. “Security’s putting a man at every exit to stop him if he tries to leave, and we’re mobilizing the nursing staff on each floor to look for him. Do you intend to join the search?”

“Uh, well, I’ve got to call the office, my boss....”

“If we find him, where will we find you?”

“Here. Right here. I’ll be here, making some calls.”

She nodded and went away. The door eased shut after her.

A privacy curtain hung from a ceiling track that described an arc around three sides of the bed. It was bunched against the wall, but Hal Yamataka drew it to the foot of the bed, blocking the view from the doorway, in case Pollard materialized just as someone stepped in from the corridor.

His hands were shaking, so he jammed them in his pockets. Then he took his left hand out to look at his wristwatch: 1:48.

Pollard had been missing for perhaps eighteen minutes—except, of course, for the few seconds during which he had flickered into existence and talked about fireflies in a windstorm. Hal decided to wait until two o’clock to call Bobby and Julie.

He stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the railing with one hand, listening to the night wind crying at the window and the rain snapping against the glass. The minutes crawled past like snails on an incline, but at least the wait gave him time to calm down and think about how he would tell Bobby what had happened.

As the hands on his watch lined up at two o’clock, he went the rest of the way around the bed and was reaching for the phone on the nightstand when he heard the eerie ululation of a distant flute. The half-drawn bed-curtain fluttered in a sudden draft.

He returned to the foot of the bed and looked past the end of the curtain to the hallway door. It was closed. That was not the source of the draft.

The flute died. The air in the room grew still, leaden.

Abruptly the curtain shivered and rippled, gently rattling the bearings in the overhead track, and a breath of cool air swept around the room, ruffling his hair. The atonal, ghostly music rose again.

With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the nightstand. But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in front of that outlet, he felt nothing issuing from it. The chilly currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.

He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on the flute. Actually, it didn’t sound like a flute when he listened closely; it was more like a fluctuant wind whistling through a lot of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones, threading together many vague but separate sounds into a loosely woven keening that was simultaneously eerie and melancholy, mournful yet somehow ... threatening. It faded, then returned a third time. To his surprise and bewilderment, the tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air above the bed.