The Hidden Man (22 page)

LATER THAT NIGHT

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN SAT BACKSTAGE,
next to the huge and dish-shaped cyclorama at the back wall. He used the near-total darkness to help him think. There were a few faint sources of light bleeding into the theatre, but they were not enough to illuminate anything. They only defined the size of the darkened space as faint reference points. The purpose of the cyclorama’s surface was to reflect sounds or light back toward the house, and it worked so well that an actor could whisper on center stage and be heard in the theatre’s back row. In reverse, the concave surface acted like a giant ear, gathering tiny sounds and concentrating them. From Blackburn’s position, the wall was an extension of his own ears, to the point that he clearly heard the building’s ongoing language of creaks and pops. Darkness enhanced his imagination until he visualized the settling of badly reinforced walls and leaky steam pipes.

Don’t kill me!
cried the theatre voices, like the panicky whine of an aging actress.

He lit a wooden match and studied the flame.

Then he pulled out his pocket watch with his free hand and saw that seven minutes had passed since the last check: ten minutes after midnight. He blew out the match.

He had six more, all of them his favorite: the new red sulfur and white phosphorous tipped “strike-anywhere” matches. Miraculous little things. He kept them in a small silver match safe that fit the palm of his hand. Closed, it was watertight. The pure silver box was rounded at the edges and quickly warmed to the touch. He usually felt better when he carried it.

Tonight the matchbox brought him back to his orders, and the orders were clear:
Wait until after midnight, when everything is quiet. Then light it up. Let it burn ’til the place is done for. Run to the corner phone box. Call it in. If anybody gets to you before you get out of there, tell them you couldn’t sleep, you went for a long walk, and thank God, you came by when you did—the neighborhood was saved. When it’s time for the papers to interview you, smile and enjoy being a hero.

His trusty little Ford would be back at the station house by the time he got there, none the worse. And as of the very next day, why, he could forget all about the ridiculous babysitting assignment to that theatre showman.

One match is all it takes, he thought. Maybe two. Set flame to a couple of good spots at once. The city government knew, and this was what they wanted. The insurance company knew, and this was what they wanted, too.

The owners were making themselves scarce, but were unlikely to object to the financial windfall that the insurers planned to shower upon them. Everybody was going to walk away fat and happy and in no mood to complain.

After all, the risk of humiliation that this place presented was apparent to him. The grand theatre was a disastrous creation of gorgeously bad work.

The plan was so simple. Blackburn noticed, however, that he had not yet started any fires. He was now ten minutes into the “go” period that began at midnight. But instead of lighting anything, what he did was sit in the darkness next to the giant ear, listening to the softly chattering architecture.

A sense of pure disgust balled up inside of him. It set off familiar words.

This is what they think of you.

Nineteen years, he had survived and endured the politics of the department, through an era of brazen corruption. A long string of arrests and solved cases were already under his belt, even before he met Shane. Afterward, he stood out even further because of having Shane’s occasional help in looking at a crime’s human puzzle.

And this is what they think of you.

After all these years, he still had no idea what had happened to Shane that had turned him into the fragile, hesitant, stammering boy he first met. Blackburn always came up against a granite wall with Shane when he tried to steer the conversation toward that question. Whatever the cause, it somehow left his adopted son with an almost supernatural insight into the darkest aspect of human nature.

But Shane’s difficulties at forming any sort of social life with people his own age revealed that the mysterious experience had not left him with any special insights into the joys and the celebrations and the compassions in human nature. With those, Shane struggled along like any other young man.

Somebody—or some series of events—seemed to have taught Shane Nightingale all about the aspect of the Devil that was found in human nature. It had taken Blackburn a generation of time served in the human swamp to come to a similar understanding. What could have brought such a thing to a boy?

But even on top of all the extra help that had flowed to the department because of Shane, this was still what the department brass thought of Randall Blackburn.

He lit the first of the six matches.

The flare of light shrank his vision down to an orange glow no larger than the reach of his arms. He wondered if the people giving these orders had completely abandoned any notion of civic responsibility. It seemed for all the world that they had turned criminal themselves, and that they were ordering him to do their criminal work for them.

This is what they think of you.

And then there was the Big Question, the one nobody wanted to go near during their briefing session. In fact, their interest seemed to ricochet right off the topic at the moment he mentioned it. Nobody was interested but him.

What if an innocent bystander gets caught in it?

Was it any less a crime? There was an ironclad certainty that these upstanding fellows would abandon him in the wake of such a thing, and he realized that under the circumstances, it would be the right thing to do.

The match went out. Without hesitating, he flipped open the lid of the little match safe and took out a second one. He struck it along the sole of his boot and watched the satisfying flare. Ingeniously manufactured in an old munitions factory in upstate New York, the red phosphorous tip was thick enough to spark against any rough surface, and the white phosphorous head would then ignite and flare in anything less than a tropical downpour. Its three-inch wooden shaft was made of New England hardwood that burned in a slow and steady flame. The warm ball of light that it put out was good for twenty seconds, in still air. The match produced a moment of luxury that he could still afford, now with four matches left.

The canvas scenic flats leaned against the wall nearby, crying out for ignition. He had checked behind them earlier and discovered the buckets of paint thinner, ready to kick over. His bosses had thought of everything. The task had been accommodated as well as anyone could desire. He thought about how much he would have liked that sort of support back when he was pulling drunks and crazies and rampaging killers off the Barbary Coast and away from the public. The message about civic priorities only added to the night’s grim picture.

The second match burned out.

He had already lit the third one before he stopped to wonder if that was actually a good idea. Then there was nothing to do but enjoy the fleeting moment. At least, he thought, he was still innocent. He had not done anything wrong yet. He was no criminal by anyone’s definition.

In this fading bit of light, he still looked out at his world through the eyes of an honest man. During all his years as a beat-walking sergeant, doing street work so violent that he routinely lied to his own parents to conceal its dangers, he had never doubted that he was on the right side. He had grown up in an honest and hardworking household, and knew for a fact that such values were real and worth defending, even in the worst parts of a city. And because he had loving parents, he also knew that a loving household was a possible achievement. He knew from his experience at home that the key was to keep mutual respect within moments of anger.

Therefore he knew that there was a very real society of good and loving people out there who were deserving of protection. Their civilized and humane ways needed to be passed along as intact as possible.

Somebody had to help see to it. If not him, then someone else. And because his greater size and strength meant that he was almost always the most persuasive individual in any crowd, who else but him? He had always held to that. For all his flaws as a social animal, he held to it throughout his career.

And this is what they think of you.

The third match burned out. He was back in the familiar darkness of the big empty space.

He struck the fourth match. That left him with two good ones. Two was still enough to do the job, he figured, if he lit things carefully enough. He used the match light to move his straight-backed chair to the center of the stage, right down at the front edge. Here he was directly in the path of the cyclorama’s focused sound. It functioned like a stethoscope; he could almost hear the building breathing, sighing, grumbling under its breath, trying to settle a bit more comfortably into its foundation.

It had already been pronounced a dying thing. The bastards were right about part of it; the whole place had to go. It had to go right now, before one more audience gathered inside it. San Francisco’s prestige theatrical destination was booked with one kind of activity or another on most days of the year: weddings, revivals, traveling shows. But now he knew for a fact that the place had the integrity of a tired whore servicing an oversized army. All in all, it just needed to fall down and lie still.

What the hell. He could expend the last two matches in the course of less than sixty seconds and have the Pacific Majestic on its way to extinction before the next minute ticked on his pocket watch. He would read it by the light of the flames.

Timing was everything here. He had to gauge how long to let the place burn inside to guarantee that the place would be a lost cause, while still giving the department time to keep it away from the surrounding buildings. As for the timing, he could only guess. If he was wrong, if somebody was out there, working late, cleaning up, or curled in a back corner and sleeping one off—that was just a bad hand, yes?

He tried to remember the last time he saw somebody survive a major fire. It was rare, but it happened. The killer was the smoke. People who did manage to survive were always the ones who got out ahead of the smoke and fumes. The rest were dead before the flames ever touched them.

What if somebody gets caught up in it?

But the question was a piece of philosophy. The flat truth was that he had never possessed interest in much of anything other than being a detective.

He had no idea how to do anything else, had never even given it a serious thought, and now he was only one year away from a pension. He opened the little silver match safe with the last two matches. He pulled one out. For a while, he sat quiet and unmoving, with the match held between his thumb and forefinger.

IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

I
MMINENT DEATH CONCENTRATES THE MIND
.

J.D. knew that the phenomenon was widely recognized, described in detail by those who had faced certain demise and somehow lived to tell about it. But until this very moment in his considerable life span, he had only known those words for the truth that they
seemed
to express. Their profundity did not register with him until the moment that his monster of a bastard son materialized out of the shadows.

The effect of seeing him could have easily triggered J.D.’s memory holes again. The godawful memory holes. And the shock of seeing a younger, stronger, faster, and many times crazier version of himself might have been enough to stop J.D.’s heart with the sheer power of the confrontation.

But just at that moment, none of those things were chemically possible. His unintentional overproduction of stomach acid matched his blast of mortal fear, and had quickly caused the very last of the wax coatings to dissolve, so that all six doses of methylenedioxymethamphetamine passed into his system at more or less the same time. His heart could not have stopped beating if he ripped it out and jumped on it.

An instant after the beginning of the attack, J.D. found that it completely altered time for him. He was able to slow down events to a syrupy pace, just by closing in on individual moments. It was as if he suddenly had the power to rush up very close to something or someone, and the closer he got, the slower everything moved.

If he mentally backed up, then things seemed to go by faster. A wave of primitive pleasure rushed through him from the bottom of his spine to the base of his skull, but the sensation was gone as quickly as it came. The evaporated euphoria left his point of view stripped raw, and because the imminence of death concentrated his mind so well, J.D. finally realized that in the material world of hard sidewalks and cold concrete walls, young Shane Nightingale was about to be killed by J.D.’s monster of a son.

He mentally moved closer to the picture of Nightingale being jerked backward under the effect of the sneak attack, and saw that a glass shard the size of a meat cleaver was poised to hack into Nightingale’s throat.

The young man’s legs had gone limp under the force of the blow to his spine, and now he sagged toward the ground, barely prevented from falling by the pressure of the glass blade on his neck. J.D. glanced at Nightingale’s eyes and felt a hint of relief that he was still conscious; the kid would be no good to either of them if he went out.

He was about to think up a quick plan of action and begin the process of diverting their assailant’s attention, when the first serious concentration of the elixir struck his brain, firing up every remaining receptor and kicking him like a draft horse.

He quickly sank into a deep and compelling hypnotic state. It happened on its own, propelled by the elixir.

Everything was suddenly effortless. He felt a vague sense of victory over whatever it was that was happening, because he knew that it was something that would ordinarily demand his attention. But instead, he was slipping away from the situation like water through a man’s fingers. It was such a relief to be shed of whatever it was that had frightened him so badly back there.

He followed them, not much more than an arm’s length or so away from the crumbled-legged young police fellow, who was being pulled backward at a surprisingly brisk pace by the younger man, who reminded J.D. a little of himself as a young man, and who had the angriest look on his face that J.D. had ever seen.

The elixir had closed down his ability to feel fear. It was the greatest moment of his long life. The sheer power of the massive dose destroyed his ability to remember much of anything, including his troubles and fears. It was wonderful, freeing, liberating beyond anything he had ever known. What did he need with memories? The pleasure they provided never matched the pain that they conveyed, anyway—eh?

Come and get me, you sons of bitches!
He almost sang it out loud. He knew just enough to realize that he was supposed to care, really care about whatever it was that was going on in front of him. This time, the fact that he could not remember just what it was seemed so funny that for a passing second he nearly laughed in delight.

He felt only a passing interest when he noted that they had arrived at the Pacific Majestic Theatre. The theatre marquee cast a thick black shadow over the entranceway.

The door was unlocked and swung open to the touch. This seemed to cause the angry man concern. He tried to pepper J.D. with questions about the unlocked door, but J.D. only knew enough to realize that none of this crap had anything to do with him.

Their assailant struck a match and made them go inside, across the foyer and into the darkened house. J.D.’s senses were more stimulated than they had ever been before. It seemed that he was hearing sounds from blocks away, seeing deeper into the darkness than he ever had. Even his sense of smell felt many times more powerful than it would normally be. He detected a trace of smoke drifting through the theatre.

The basic function of smell easily captured his attention. He rode his nose down the darkened center aisle, carried along by his fascination over the origin of the smoke. There was not enough of a burned scent to the air to alert the others, yet, but J.D. could tell that they were moving toward the source of the smoke while they pushed deeper into the empty building.

The young man with the bleeding neck seemed to have calmed down and decided to play along, which J.D. admired. Thus the odd trio moved on down the center aisle, headed for the stage.