The Dark Door (14 page)

But Sheriff Maschi said he intended to drive in and would watch from that ridge, Charlie told himself firmly. That meant it was accessible. Period. As soon as he left the highway, he turned off his lights, and he and John sat silently waiting for their eyes to adjust.

Finally Charlie began to drive. Within two hundred yards, the car lurched and came to a grinding stop at an angle. Neither man spoke for several moments. “Not a shadow,” Charlie said then. Carefully he opened his door and
looked out over a drop-off on his side; five or six
feet only, but enough to roll them. More carefully he backed up a few yards and stopped again. “Okay,” he said. “One of us has to walk it first, guide the other one in. Take turns. You want to go first?”

John had not made a sound during this. Now he swallowed hard and nodded. “Sure.”

It was excruciatingly slow. John walked in a back and forth pattern, making certain there was room for the car to move in. Once he and Charlie had to roll a boulder out of the way to avoid backing up hundreds of feet. The dry lake gleamed smooth and deadly off to the left. All around them the desert seemed frozen: no animal stirred, no night bird flew or rustled; everything was holding its breath, waiting for them to pass. Then Charlie was the guide, walking back and forth, beckoning as he went. They turned at the edge of the hill and started the last part of the trip. It was three in the morning. The shadows had shrunken, hugged the sage and rocks, creating small black caves at the bases. Charlie was guiding when the Old West town came into view. He stopped and gazed at it in the moonlight. It was less than a mile away, two hundred feet below them. The buildings were shadows looming above the land; the two old buildings with silvered wood caught the moonlight and reflected it eerily. The hotel looked bigger than Charlie remembered; he knew that was a trick of the light, nothing more. He moved on, waving to John to follow. This was not a good place to stop. They needed an area where they could turn the car, have it pointing out when the job was done. They would drive back around the hill, stop and wait for the fire to rout the thing in the hotel, and then return to watch it burn. By then there would be enough morning light to allow them to drive out faster than they had come in. By then the state police would have their hands full down there, not be watching for strays on the desert, they hoped. The only real danger in all this, Charlie told himself again, was in showing a light in the darkness. That would be visible for miles. He found a spot where John could turn the car around with half a dozen forward and backward maneuvers. Then they both stood and regarded the scene below. Less than a mile, Charlie thought with some uneasiness, but the car’s engine noise was behind him, signaling safety.

Charlie returned to the car and pulled out the pack he had assembled, slipped his arms through the loops.

“I’m going down,” John Loesser said at his elbow.

“Nope. There may be a guard down here. And he could be crazy as a bedbug, or sleeping, or listening to a radio. Point is we don’t
know. But John, keep the motor running, right?”

His voice was low and easy, revealing nothing of the fear he felt. John Loesser hesitated a moment, then nodded. They shook hands, and Charlie started down the slope cautiously. Fifteen minutes to get down there, he was thinking, checking his slide. Not a good time to start tumbling, take it easy, no rush. Fifteen minutes to get there, five to arrange things, ten to get back. Not bad, not bad. He dug in his heels and grabbed a boulder when loose dirt shifted beneath his feet. After a moment he started again. Half an hour.

Constance was aware that headlights had appeared behind her, but she ignored them as she sped through Grayling to the house. She ran inside, to the bedroom where the bed had been torn apart, and stood there for a second. She looked inside John’s room, hurried back to the other one, and searched the bureau drawer for Charlie’s gun. It was there, and it was loaded. She slipped it in her pocket, turned, and ran from the house. Sheriff Maschi caught her on the porch, and her hand tightened on the gun in her pocket. That was what it was for, to keep anyone from stopping her, she realized.

“That damn fool gone?” Sheriff Maschi demanded.

“Let me go,” she said. “I have to leave.”

“You can’t get near that place,” he said, holding her shoulders. “That goddamn fool.” He shook her with anger. “They’ll hold you until morning, then escort you back to the house. Come on. Come on. I know where that damn fool went.” He nearly pushed her to the police car.

He slowed down at the spot where Charlie had turned off the highway, sweeping the area with his searchlight, then drove on to leave the road half a mile farther down. He drove with his lights on, bumping and jouncing, but making good time, swerving now and then, cursing steadily.

Constance did not speak; she stared ahead fixedly and now and then relaxed her grip on the gun, but she did not take her hand away from it.

The moonlight was tricky, Charlie thought, crouched behind the corral fence, examining the hotel and the street of Old West. Moonlight flattened everything, erased depth. No radio noise, no motor noise now, but he hoped that was simply because he had gone out of range. Nothing moved. He edged around the fence and onto the porch of the old silvery hotel. The boards creaked alarmingly, but there was no help for that. He stepped in closer to the building, hoping the boards would be tighter there. Twice he had seen a light on the ridge opposite where John Loesser was stationed; the state police, no doubt, on patrol, out of range. The fact that he had been able to see their light meant that he had to be careful with his, he knew, and did not use his small beam flashlight yet. A tarp was over the double doors at the front entrance, the way the construction men had left it when they decided not to come back. The heavy plastic coated material had been nailed down loosely. He pulled it away from the door frame enough to permit him to enter; inside, the blackness was deep and hollow sounding. He waited for his eyes and ears to adjust before he moved again.

No one had been out back, on the porch, or anywhere else in sight, and he was certain no one was in this building with him. Not yet. He flicked on his flashlight and looked around swiftly. He knew the renovation of the hotel had been started, just not how far it had gone.
There were two-by-fours stacked up, other lum
ber here and there, but the floor and the outside walls were intact as far as he could tell. As soon as he was away from the tarp covered door, he turned on his light again, and this time kept it on and began to move fast.

In the upper hallway he removed his pack and began to arrange his materials. First the blanket, then, at both ends of it, the nests he had made for the candles. He poured the gasoline on the blanket carefully and let it soak in for a moment or two as he opened the bath towels he had soaked in cooking oil back at the house. He covered the blanket with them. He did not want fumes to ignite prematurely; and when they did ignite, he wanted an explosive reaction. He folded the sides of the blanket in over the edges of the towels and examined it all with his flashlight. Finally he went to the candles and lighted first one, then the other. He closed the top of the juice carton, then the cereal box top, counted to five, examined his candles again, and grunted with satisfaction. He left the hotel quickly. He was tempted to open a can or two of paint, but the heat would do it for him. Don’t be greedy, he told himself, swiftly scanning the street, the other buildings. Then he was in the corral, out the other side, and on his way up the slope to where John Loesser was waiting. It had taken less than five minutes.

John Loesser’s relief left him feeling weak when Charlie reappeared. Not a flicker had betrayed him, not a sound. Experience counts, he thought dryly. Charlie started up the slope.

Mike Dorrance and Larry Womack had pulled the dumb assignment, they both agreed. Sit on a barren ridge and guard a ghost town. They had grumbled at first, and then had frightened each other with stories of cougars and Sasquatch and flying saucers; they had shared a couple of joints, and for two hours had alternately dozed and jerked awake. “Guard it from what, for Christ’s sake?” Womack had exclaimed when they first arrived in the jeep at midnight. The old town looked like a movie set down there. Delgado had not said from what. He had drawn a line on a map and said don’t get any closer than that, and don’t let anything or anyone in. That was all.

There were only three possible ways to get in: by the road on the other side of the valley that had been barricaded, over the narrow-gauge railroad tracks, or through the open desert and over the damn ridge they were to patrol. Now and then one of them left the jeep to walk a dozen or so feet and look around, but there wasn’t anything to see. Womack emptied his thermos of coffee, stretched and yawned, and went to have a look around this time. It was getting colder; a chill breeze had started to blow in. He went the ten feet or so that they had decided was their patrol, and then he stopped
and shook his head. Lights, for God’s sake! Who
the fuck would be wanting in at this hour? Delgado? A relief car? He hoped so.

He called Mike Dorrance and they watched the lights wobble over the rough ground. Then Mike heard another engine. He turned his head, listening hard. “Hear that?”

It took a bit longer for Womack to make out the noise. He nodded, more frightened than he had been at the talk of cougars. He reached into the back of the jeep and pulled out a semiautomatic rifle. The approaching lights went out. Nervously they waited. The car must have gone around rocks, behind a hill, something. Very slowly they accepted that it was coming the rest of the way without any lights, or that it had stopped and whoever was in it was coming on foot. Mike Dorrance drew his .45.

“You cover the guy coming in,” Dorrance said. “I’ll find the other one.”

They separated, moving cautiously, very nervous.

“Two cars,” Sheriff Maschi muttered at the spot where the tracks he had been following suddenly became tracks of two separate vehicles, one set going off to the right, one to the left. The air was pungent with the fragrance of newly crushed sage, and that was as much a trail as the car tracks. He made his decision and turned to the right. He had his lights off, just in case someone was on the ridge opposite Old West; he had not considered that Delgado would have a patrol on this side. But that was what it looked like to him now.

He inched forward again, then stopped. “Hell and damnation,” he muttered. “If that’s Delgado’s patrol, they’ll blow us off the desert if we sneak up on them. I’m going to scout ahead. Can’t be much farther, ain’t much farther you can get.”

“You keep the motor going,” Constance said, opening her door. “I’ll look.”

“Stick close to the rocks there,” he said. “It’s got to be just on the other side of that outcrop.”

She slipped out, did not let the door close all the way, and vanished into the shadows of the outcropping. A second or two later, Maschi heard, very close to his side of the car, “Old man, turn off that engine and toss the keys out! Pronto! Or I’ll blow your head off!”

He jerked around to see a man with a rifle pointed at his face. “I’m Sheriff Maschi,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I don’t care if you’re the king of Siam,” the man said. Maschi heard the tremulous note of fear, the soft undercurrent of nervous excitement, and he knew this man would shoot him.

“I’m here on official business,” he said, and pushed his door open. “Delgado knows I’m up here, goddamn it!” He swung his legs out the door and with every second he expected to hear the report, feel the impact. The man was moving in; suddenly he sprang and grabbed Maschi and twisted him around, slammed him face first onto the back door. He reached inside the car, yanked the keys out, and put them in his pocket while Maschi gasped, trying to get his breath.

Constance edged around the outcropping; there was the black Malibu. She let out a breath. The engine was running. Then she stopped again. A man had appeared; he reached into the car and pulled the keys out, and at the same time John Loesser stood up. She had not seen him until then. He had been squatting at the top of the hill, looking down, she realized. The man who had taken the keys yelled, “Freeze! Police!” John froze.

She realized suddenly that the other engine had been turned off, and she pushed away from the rocks, shouted, and then felt disoriented, dizzy, out of control. She reached for the rocks to keep from falling; a stab of pain in her head made her close her eyes. When she could open them again, the dizziness fading, she saw the officer with the gun moving almost in slow motion in her direction, the gun raised. His face was blank; the moonlight intensified the mask of madness over it. Behind her someone was yelling. The madman turned from her and went that way, walking like a zombie. At that moment, Charlie appeared over the edge of the hill; when he saw her his expression became incredulous. And then he changed. He stopped advancing. He stood without moving. A strangely hurt look passed over his face; his eyes flickered but did not close.

Constance found the gun was in her hand; she did not know when she had taken it from her pocket. She raised it, aimed at Charlie, and fired.

Chapter 14

Constance heard John
Loesser yelling, heard other gunshots, and paid no attention. Charlie was sprawled on the rocky ground, not moving. She raced to him, pulled his jacket open, and located the wound, high on his right arm.

“Start the engine!” she screamed at John Loesser and began to search through Charlie’s pocket for his knife. She found it and cut the jacket away from his arm, cut his shirt away, and rolled up the sleeve to make a pressure bandage. Another light came on, shining on Charlie; the sheriff stood over her cursing.

“How bad is he?”

“It isn’t too bad. We need a hospital, a doctor. …” She looked up finally and he was shocked at the lack of color in her face. “He…”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll get the other fellow to help
carry him to my car. Just hold that bandage in place another minute or two.”

John Loesser sat in the Malibu revving the motor, staring at Constance. Sheriff Maschi had to shake his arm before he was heard. “I need help,” he said again. “Listen to me,” he ordered when Loesser got out of the car. “Delgado’s man killed his partner, tried like hell to kill me, and he shot Charlie. You understand?” Loesser stared without comprehension. Maschi repeated it roughly, and finally he nodded. Together they returned to Charlie near the top of the ridge. The hotel suddenly became a torch; flames exploded from half a dozen upper windows all at once. The light breeze scattered sparks and a second building erupted.

Sheriff Maschi and John Loesser got Charlie into the back seat of the sheriff’s car, with Constance holding the pressure bandage. Her face looked like ivory, even her lips. Delgado’s men would come collect the body of the officer, the sheriff said to John Loesser.

He looked at the man closely. “You okay? If you’re not, sit tight. Delgado’s going to be up here in no time.” He glanced at Charlie and shifted gears. “We’ll be at the clinic in Grayling.” The glow from the fire was like a false sunrise, he thought distantly. Before he drove
away, he added, “You know that if anyone went
down that slope, there’ll be a trail. People out here put stock in things like trails. Lots of loose boulders around, though, might’ve rolled down when they were disturbed. Never can tell.” He left, driving fast.

John Loesser went back to the edge of the ridge and watched the fire that was leaping from the saloon to the dry goods store. Then he started to roll boulders over the edge of the hill. He did not stop until cars and trucks appeared on the road going to Old West on the other side of the valley.

“Mrs. Meiklejohn,” Sheriff Maschi said, glancing over his shoulder at her. She wasn’t
going to faint, not yet anyway. “Listen a minute.
Delgado’s man went crazy, just like we all expected someone would. He shot Charlie, and then his partner. Case closed. Got that, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

Thank God she didn’t argue. He went on: “Now, listen, Constance. You mind if I call you that?” He didn’t wait for her response. “We have to tell the doc what you think might have happened to Charlie. We can’t let him be fixing up your husband when he wakes up, and not be prepared, just in case.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I know.”

When had she told him anything, she wondered. “John Loesser saw. He knows.”

“Way I figure it, he knows more than he ought, considering how he just got here, but anyway, we agreed that Delgado’s guy did it. I took you up there to meet Charlie and his associate. We all wanted to see the show when it started, and then Delgado’s man started shooting. Delgado’s not going to like it, but what the hell can he do?”

He was talking to fill in the black spot of doubt that was in the car with him. He had counted the shots, he knew when the shot had come in from the edge of the hill, and by the time he had got there, Loesser had been inside the car racing the motor, and she had been on the ground taking care of Charlie. That had been plain enough. And he knew the only thing that could have made her shoot Charlie was the awareness that it, whatever the hell it was, had tried to take him.

It was all Delgado’s fault, sending two guys out without telling them anything. Two more men gone: one dead, one raving out on the desert. Charlie maybe infected, whatever the hell that meant. And if he was crazy, then Constance… . He cursed under his breath. Goddamn Delgado, let him take the rap for it all, including Charlie.

John Loesser/Carson Danvers watched in awe as the whole town blazed. Abruptly he turned and left. “The whole damn town,” he muttered. Had Charlie planned that? He knew better, but the police probably would assume it. And this time they might look harder for the arsonist. He wondered how much insurance would be involved this time, and he did not want to hang around long enough to find out. He knew, with regret, that it was time to kill off John Loesser.

He drove to the clinic to check on Charlie. He was sleeping, his arm bandaged up to his shoulder, restraints on his legs, on his good wrist. John hesitated in the doorway to the small makeshift hospital room.

“I’m leaving,” he said softly to Constance, who was sitting by the bed. She still looked ghostly pale.

She started, then relaxed and stood up. “They’ll want to ask you questions,” she said. “They’ll take fingerprints maybe, find out…”

“I’m leaving,” he said again, and this time she nodded. “I don’t know yet where I’ll be, or when.” He looked past her at Charlie. “I’d like to know…”

Almost in a whisper she said, “There’s a place in New York. Father Patrick Morley. It’s a home for boys, on Houston Street. Tell him…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you should tell him. I’ll call him as soon as we know.” Why was Charlie still unconscious, she wanted to ask, demand of him, of anyone who might know something about it and how it worked on people. She reached out, her hand was on his arm, but she withdrew it and shook her head. She didn’t dare ask; the question implied her fear about Charlie, and she was desperately trying to refuse even the possibility that he had been affected.

The doctor came in to examine Charlie again; John Loesser was gone when he was finished. Constance sat in the chair by the bed once more, waiting.

At two thirty in the afternoon, Charlie stirred, grunted when he tried to roll over, and finally opened his eyes. Constance pressed the call button, as she had promised to do, and watched Charlie. The doctor entered, holding a syringe. If Charlie woke up insane and violent, the restraints might not hold, he had warned Constance.

Charlie blinked at the ceiling and tried to lift his arm, then his torso. He turned his head and saw Constance. She watched the puzzlement, the pain, and finally anger that he could not move, and when he looked at her, she found that she was holding her breath.

“Charlie,” she whispered in a long exhalation. The terror she had been holding back, the tears, the guilt, the uncertainty, all exploded together and she lowered her face onto his chest and wept.

They decided that Charlie would be as comfortable at the rented house as in the clinic, and Constance took him home just before dark.

Sheriff Maschi had dropped by to help.

“No more dope,” Charlie said firmly in the den, his feet up on the coffee table, his arm supported on the sofa arm. “A double bourbon, kissed by an ice cube, and forget the water.” While Constance made drinks, he looked at the sheriff. “What’s going on?”

Logan Maschi shrugged. “Too much. Your pal is gone, the insurance guy, John Loesser. Caught a plane out of Vegas to L.A., left his car in the lot. That whole town’s burned to the ground, lock, stock, and barrel. Delgado’s man is still out there wandering around on the desert, far’s anyone knows. His partner’s dead, of course. Thanks,” he said to Constance and took a glass.

Charlie took his own and drank, less deeply than he had intended. He still had too much dope in him, he knew. Nothing that the sheriff had said so far seemed very important. The important thing was that Constance had shot him and saved his life. He watched her move about the den, watched Maschi watch her also, and knew that Maschi was aware that she had shot him. He was gazing at her with near reverence.

Sheriff Maschi drained his glass and stood up. “I’m going home. Charlie, Constance, take it easy tonight. Tomorrow you’ll have Dick Delgado to deal with, and he’s madder’n hell, but there’s not a hell of a lot he can do, far’s I can see.”

“One question,” Charlie murmured. “Why pin it on Delgado’s guy? Not that I object, but why?”

Maschi shrugged. “Delgado’s going to be looking for a way to get you, get me, all of us. Be careful with him. Like I said, he’s mad. No point in having him put Constance through a lot of grief, though. No point at all. See you.”

Charlie grinned at Constance after they were alone again. “Thanks, by the way.”

“Think nothing of it,” she said, just as airily. “Will that story hold?”

“Should. Who’s going to refute it?” He yawned. “Christ, let’s sleep. You haven’t closed your eyes at all yet. Come on.”

Delgado was as angry as Sheriff Maschi had said he would be. His face had been flushed, his eyes black and dangerous looking, and he had been helpless. He had asked questions and left again. Now Byron leaned forward and regarded Charlie with a steady gaze.

“Look, you’re the only one we know who was
attacked and recovered. And you, Constance, you saw what was happening, recognized what was going on, and you were in the zone of its influence. This may be the breakthrough we’ve needed from the start. Charlie, can you remember how it felt, what you thought, anything?”

Charlie opened his good hand and flexed his fingers, then started to close them as if around an object. “Like that,” he said, watching his hand. “Being squeezed, like a soft snowball that is going to crumble any second. Only not with anything physical. Pressure, not electrical actually, but not physical either. That’s as close as I can come.”

“Was it painful? Hot? Cold? Steady? Intermit
tent?”

“Painful,” Charlie said, sipping bourbon between words. “Steady.”

Byron turned to Constance. “What did you feel and see?”

She described it exactly as she had lived through it, the disorientation, the blinding pain, dizziness. She looked startled, then added, “But I kept feeling something afterward. Like a charged area, like under a high-tension tower.” She shook her head in quick denial. “Not like that, not really. I don’t know what it was like. All around me.”

Byron was making notes as they talked; now he put his notebook aside and picked up his drink, scowling darkly at it. “You’re both sure it wasn’t directional? Like a beam of energy, rays, something like that?”

“Already thought of that,” Charlie said. “Just wasn’t the way it was.”

Constance was equally certain. Whatever she had felt had been all around her, not coming from any one direction. She described the state policeman and his look of madness, and then said, “I knew that whatever had hit me was attacking Charlie, only the effects were different. I was doubled over with a stabbing pain in my head, but he looked hurt, erased somehow, blank.”

“Can you put it in a time frame?” Byron asked. “Apparently the policeman was attacked at the same time, and you couldn’t watch what happened to him. How long did it go on with Charlie before the shot?” He believed the mad deputy had shot Charlie, as everyone else did.

She reconstructed it in her mind, her distance from Charlie, taking the few steps she had taken, raising the gun, firing. Finally she said, “Ten seconds, fifteen at the most.” She looked at Charlie and said softly, “I saw the moment it attacked you. One moment you were looking at me and I could read you, and then you were blank, hurt. I saw it happen.”

And the shot had set off a rush of adrenaline, an electrochemical shock reaction in his brain that must have been explosive to the thing,
whatever it was. As much as any motor was, any
electrical activity. By then John Loesser had got the Malibu engine running again, and the danger was past. But if she had not shot him, if she had stopped to think, to take better aim, to do anything, he would be dead, he was certain. Dead at the hands of the sheriff, or Delgado, or the other madman, his own hands, hers. And if not dead, then brain dead, living dead, maybe for twenty or thirty years or longer. He shuddered.

“When I get back to L.A. I’m going to see if I can’t get some people from the physics department to investigate all this,” Byron said, but he sounded doubtful.

“The problem,” Charlie said, “is that there’s nothing to investigate until it pops up again somewhere else. If you hear, let me know, will you?”

“And you, too.”

Delgado returned once more to demand information about John Loesser. “We just met the man for the first time right here,” Constance said calmly. “He’s an independent adjuster.”

Charlie shrugged, then winced.

“We’ll find him,” Delgado said. “And when we do, we get him for arson, and that, Meiklejohn, means we’ll have you as accessory.”

“Then arrest me already,” Charlie said. “Because if you don’t, I’m going home tomorrow. You know damn well your men were scrambling because of gunfire a long time before the blaze started. I was busy getting shot at personally, and John Loesser was busy trying to keep the car motor running. Shit or get off the pot, Delgado.”

He left in a white fury.

“He’s right,” Constance said. “No jury will believe we all just happened to go up there to see the show. Not at three in the morning. Charlie, can they do something to you? As accessory?”

“I’m not a damn accessory,” he grumbled.

She looked startled, then whispered, “Dear God.”