The Bad Place (61 page)

JULIE HAD heard and seen enough, too much.

Eager to get away from Frank, she rose from the sofa and walked to the desk, where she considered her unfinished bourbon. But that was no answer. She was dreadfully tired, struggling to repress her grief for Thomas, striving even harder to make some sense out of the grotesque family history that Fogarty had revealed to them. She did not need the complication of any more bourbon, appealing as it might look there in the glass.

She said to the old man, “So what hope do we have of dealing with Candy?”

“None.”

“There must be a way.”

“No.”

“There must be.”

“Why?”

“Because he can’t be allowed to win.”

Fogarty smiled. “Why not?”

“Because he’s the bad guy, dammit! And we’re the good guys. Not perfect, maybe, not without flaws, but we’re the good guys, all right. And that’s why we have to win, because if we don’t, then the whole game is meaningless.”

Fogarty leaned back in his chair. “My point exactly. It is all meaningless. We’re not good, and we’re not bad, we’re just meat. We don’t have souls, there’s no hope of transcendence for a slab of meat, you wouldn’t expect a hamburger to go to Heaven after someone ate it.”

She had never hated anyone as much as she hated Fogarty at that moment, partly because he was so smug and hateful, but partly because she recognized, in his arguments, something perilously close to the things she had said to Bobby in the motel, after she had learned about Thomas’s death. She had said there was no point in having dreams, that they never came true, that death was always there watching even if you were lucky enough to grasp your personal brass ring. And loathing life, just because it led sooner or later to death ... well, that was the same as saying people were nothing but meat.

“We have just pleasure and pain,” the old physician said,. “so it doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong, who wins or loses.”

“What’s his weakness?” she demanded angrily.

“None I can see.” Fogarty seemed pleased by the hopeless-ness of their position. If he had been practicing medicine in the early 1940s, he had to be nearing eighty, though he looked younger. He was acutely aware of how little time remained to him, and was no doubt resentful of anyone younger; and given his cold perspective on life, their deaths at Candy Pollard’s hands would entertain him. “No weaknesses at all.”

Bobby disagreed, or tried to. “Some might say that his weakness is his mind, his screwed-up psychology.”

Fogarty shook his head. “And I’d argue that he’s made a strength of his screwed-up psychology. He’s used this business about being the instrument of God’s vengeance to armor himself very effectively from depression and self-doubt and anything else that might trip him up.”

In the wingback chair, Frank abruptly sat up straighter, shook himself as if to cast off his mental confusion the way a dog might shake water from its sodden coat after coming in from the rain. He said, “Where ... Why do I ... Is it ... is it... is it ... ?”

“Is it what, Frank?” Bobby asked.

“Is it happening?” Frank said. His eyes seemed slowly to be clearing. “Is it finally happening?”

“Is what finally happening, Frank?”

His voice was hoarse. “Death. Is it finally happening? Is it?”

CANDY HAD crept quietly through the house, into the hallway that led to the library. As he moved toward the open door on the left, he heard voices. When he recognized one of them as Frank’s, he could barely contain himself.

According to Violet, Frank was crippled. His control of his telekinetic talent had always been erratic, which is why Candy had enjoyed some hope of one day catching him and finishing him before he could travel to a place of safety. Perhaps the moment of triumph had arrived.

When he reached the door, he found himself looking at the woman’s back. He could not see her face, but he was sure that it would be the same one that had been suffused in a beatific glow in Thomas’s mind.

Beyond her he glimpsed Frank, and saw Frank’s eyes widen at the sight of him. If the mother-killer had been too mentally confused to teleport out of Candy’s reach, as Violet had claimed, he was now casting off that confusion. He looked as if he might pop out of there long before Candy could lay a hand on him.

Candy had intended to throw the library into a turmoil by sending a wave of energy through the doorway ahead of him, setting the books on fire and shattering the lamps, with the purpose of panicking and distracting the Dakotas and Doc Fogarty, giving him a chance to go straight for Frank. But now he was forced to change his plans by the sight of his brother trembling on the edge of dematerialization.

He entered the room in a rush and seized the woman from behind, curling his right arm around her neck and jerking her head back, so she—and the two men—would understand at once that he could snap her neck in an instant, whenever he chose. Even so, she slashed backward with one foot, scraping the heel of her shoe down his shin, stomping on his foot, all of which hurt like hell; it was some martial-art move, and he could tell by the way she tried to counterbalance his grip and stance that she had a lot of training in such things. So he jerked her head back again, even harder, and flexed his biceps, which pinched her windpipe, hurting her enough to make her realize that resistance was suicidal.

Fogarty watched from his chair, alarmed but not sufficiently to rise to his feet, and the husband came off the sofa with a gun in his hand, Mr. Quick-Draw Artist, but Candy was not concerned about either of them. His attention was on Frank, who had risen from his chair and appeared about to blink out of there, off to Punaluu and Kyoto and a score of other places.

“Don’t do it, Frank!” he said sharply. “Don’t run away. It’s time we settled, time you paid for what you did to our mother. You come to the house, accept God’s punishment, and end it now, tonight. I’m going there with this bitch. She tried to help you, I guess, so maybe you won’t want to see her suffer.”

The husband was going to do something crazy; seeing Julie in Candy’s grip had clearly unhinged him. He was searching for a shot, a way to get Candy without getting her, and he might even risk firing at Candy’s head, though Candy was half crouching behind the woman. Time to get out of there.

“Come to the house,” he told Frank. “You come into the kitchen, let me end it for you, and I’ll let her go. I swear on our mother’s name, I’ll let her go. But if you don’t come in fifteen minutes, I’ll put this bitch on the table, and I’ll have my dinner, Frank. You want me to feed on her after she tried to help you, Frank?”

Candy thought he heard a gunshot just as he got out of there. In any event, it had been too late. He rematerialized in the kitchen of the house on Pacific Hill Road, with Julie Dakota still locked in the crook of his arm.

No LONGER concerned about the danger of touching Frank, Bobby grabbed handsful of his jacket and shoved him backward against the wide-louvred shutters on the library window. “You heard him, Frank. Don’t run. Don’t run this time, or I’ll hang on to you and never let go, no matter where you take me, I swear to God, you’ll wish you’d put your neck on Candy’s platter instead of mine.” He slammed Frank against the shutters to make his point, and behind him he heard Lawrence Fogarty’s soft, knowing laughter.

Registering the terror and confusion in his client’s eyes, Bobby realized that his threats would not achieve the effect he desired. In fact, threats would almost certainly frighten Frank into flight, even if he wanted to help Julie. Worse, by stooping to violence as a first resort, he was treating Frank not as a person but as meat, confirming the depraved code by which the corrupt old physician had led his entire life, and that was almost as intolerable as losing Julie.

He let go of Frank.

“I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sorry, I just got a little crazy.”

He studied the man’s eyes, searching for some indication that sufficient intelligence remained in the damaged brain for the two of them to reach an understanding. He saw fear, stark and terrible, and he saw a loneliness that made him want to cry. He saw a lost look, too, hot unlike what he had sometimes seen in Thomas’s eyes when they had taken him on an excursion from Cielo Vista, “out in the world,” as he had said.

Aware that perhaps two minutes of Candy’s fifteen-minute deadline had passed, trying to remain calm nonetheless, Bobby took Frank’s right hand, turned it palm up, and forced himself to touch the dead roach that was now integrated with the man’s soft white flesh. The insect felt crisp and bristly against his fingers, but he did not permit his disgust to show.

“Does this hurt, Frank? This bug mixed up with your own cells here, does it hurt you?”

Frank stared at him, finally shook his head. No.

Heartened by the establishment of even this much dialogue, Bobby gently put his fingertips to Frank’s right temple, feeling the lumps of precious gems like unburst boils or cancerous tumors.

“Do you hurt here, Frank? Are you in pain?”

“No,” Frank said, and Bobby’s heart pounded with excitement at the escalation to a spoken response.

From a pocket of his jeans, Bobby removed a folded Kleenex and gently blotted away the spittle that still glistened on Frank’s chin.

The man blinked, and his eyes seemed to focus better.

From behind Bobby, still in the leather chair at the desk, perhaps with a glass of bourbon in his hand, almost certainly with that infuriatingly smug smile plastered on his face, Fogarty said, “Twelve minutes left.”

Bobby ignored the physician. Maintaining eye contact with his client, his fingertips still on Frank’s temple, he said quietly, “It’s been a hard life for you, hasn’t it? You were the normal one, the most normal one, and when you were a kid you always wanted to fit in at school, didn’t you, the way your sisters and brother never could. And it took you a long time to realize your dream wasn’t going to happen, you weren’t going to fit in, because no matter how normal you were compared to the rest of your family, you’d still come from that goddamned house, out of that
cesspool,
which made you forever an outsider to other people. They might not see the stain on your heart, might not know the dark memories in you, but you saw, and
you
remembered, and you felt yourself unworthy because of the horror that was your family. Yet you were also an outsider at home, much too sane to fit in there, too sensitive to the nightmare of it. So all your life, you’ve been alone.”

“All my life,” Frank said. “And always will be.”

He wasn’t going to travel now. Bobby would have bet on it.

“Frank, I can’t help you. No one can. That’s a hard truth, but I won’t lie to you. I’m not going to con you or threaten you.”

Frank said nothing, but maintained eye contact.

“Ten minutes,” Fogarty said.

“The only thing I can do for you, Frank, is show you a way to give your life meaning at last, a way to end it with purpose and dignity, and maybe find peace in death. I have an idea, a way that you might be able to kill Candy and save Julie, and if you can do that, you’ll have gone out a hero. Will you come with me, Frank, listen to me, and not let Julie die?”

Frank didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. Bobby decided to take heart from the lack of a negative response.

“We’ve got to get moving, Frank. But don’t try teleporting to the house, because then you’ll just lose control again, pop off to hell and back a hundred times. We’ll go in my car. We can be there in five minutes.”

Bobby took his client’s hand. He made a point of taking the one with the roach embedded in it, hoping Frank would remember that he had a fear of bugs and perceive that his willingness to overrule the phobia was a testament to his sincerity.

They crossed the room to the door.

Rising from his chair, Fogarty said, “You’re going to your death, you know.”

Without glancing back at the physician, Bobby said, “Well, seems to me, you went to yours decades ago.”

He and Frank walked out into the rain and were drenched by the time they got into the car.

Behind the wheel, Bobby glanced at his watch. Less than eight minutes to go.

He wondered why he accepted Candy’s word that the fifteen-minute deadline would be observed, why he was so sure that the madman had not already torn out her throat. Then he remembered something she had said to him once:
Sweet-cakes, as long as you’re breathing, Tinkerbell will live.

Gutters overflowed, and a sudden wind wound skeins of rain, like silver yam, through his headlights.

As he drove the storm-swept streets and turned east on Pacific Hill Road, he explained how Frank, through his sacrifice of himself, could rid the world of Candy and undo his mother’s evil the way he had wanted to undo it—but had failed—when he had taken the ax to her. It was a simple concept. He was able to go over it several times even in the few minutes they had before pulling to a stop at the rusted iron gate.