The Throat (78 page)

Baxter
dropped his arms. I could almost see the question mark floating over
his head. "This doesn't make any sense. Your check is on a New York
bank."

"I'm a
troubleshooter for my company. I was in Millhaven when Mrs.
Leatherwood's problem came up."

"He told me
about my nephew—Fee was a major in Vietnam."

"Special
Forces," I said. "He had quite a career."

Baxter
scowled at the check again. "I think we'll use your phone to get in
touch with Mr. Underhill's company."

"Why not call
the bank to see if the check is covered?" I asked him. "Isn't that the
main point?"

"You're
giving her this money yourself?"

"You could
look at it like that," I said.

Baxter stewed
for a moment and then picked up the telephone and asked for directory
assistance in New York. He put the call through the home's switchboard
and asked to speak to the manager of my branch. He spoke for a long
time without getting anywhere and finally said, "I'm holding a
five-thousand-dollar check this man made out to one of our residents. I
want to be assured that he can cover it."

There was a
long pause. Baxter's face grew red.

"I knew I
should have called Jimmy," said Judy Leatherwood.

"All right,"
Baxter said. "Thank you. I'll personally deposit the check this
afternoon." He hung up and looked at me for a moment before handing the
check back to her. The question mark still hung over his head. "Judy,
you just got five thousand dollars, but I'm not sure why. When you
first talked to this insurance company, did someone tell you the amount
you were supposed to get?"

"Five
thousand," she said, with an extra wobble in her voice.

"I'll walk
Mr. Underhill to the door." He stepped out into the hall and waited for
me to follow him.

I said
good-bye to Judy Leatherwood and joined Baxter in the hallway. He set
off at a quick march toward the big blue doors and the entrance, giving
me sharp, inquisitive glances as we went. Betty Crocker waved good-bye
to me. Once we got outside, Baxter stuffed his hands into the pockets
of his shiny suit. "Are you going to explain what you just did in
there?"

"I gave her a
check for five thousand dollars."

"But you
don't work for any insurance company."

"It's a
little more complicated than that."

"Was her
nephew really a Green Beret major?"

I nodded.

"Does this
money come from him?"

"You might
say that he owes a lot of people," I said.

He thought it
over. "I think my responsibility ends at this point. I'm going to say
good-bye to you, Mr. Underhill." He didn't offer to shake hands. I
walked to my car, and he stood in the sun on the concrete apron until I
drove past the entrance.

I turned in
the keys to the Chrysler and paid for the gas I had used at the
counter. There was still half an hour to fill before boarding, so I
went to the telephones to call Glenroy Breakstone. "Tangent?" he asked
me. "Tangent, Ohio? Man, that's a dead place. Back in the fifties, we
played a place called the French Quarter there, and the owner used to
pay us in one-dollar bills." I asked if I could come up to see him
after I got back to Millhaven. "How soon?" he asked. I told him that
I'd be there in about two hours. "As long as you're here before eight,"
he said. "I got a little business to do around then."

After that I
tried Tom Pasmore's number, on the off-chance that he might be up, and
when his machine answered, I began describing what I had learned from
Edward Hubbel and Judy Leatherwood. He picked up before I was able to
say more than a couple of sentences. "This case is turning my day
around," he said. "I went to bed about an hour after you left, and I
got up about noon to play with my machines a little more. So you found
out, did you?"

"I found out,
all right," I said, and told him about it in detail.

"Well, that's
that," he said, "but I still feel like exploring matters for a while,
just to see if anything interesting turns up."

Then I told
him about giving Judy Leatherwood a check.

"Oh, you
didn't! No, no, no." He was laughing. "Look, I'll pay you back as soon
as I see you."

"Tom, I'm not
criticizing you, but I couldn't leave her stranded."

"What do you
think I am? I sent her a check for five thousand yesterday." He started
laughing again. "She's going to love Mid-States Insurance."

"Oh, hell," I
said.

He offered
once again to pay me back.

"One white
lie shouldn't cost you ten thousand dollars," I said.

"But it was
my white lie." He was still laughing.

We talked for
a few more minutes. There was still a lot of fog in Millhaven, and a
small-scale riot had begun on Messmer Avenue. No one had been injured,
so far.

I asked the
cheerful blond person at the airline desk if the flight would be
delayed. He said there were no problems.

Twenty
minutes after we left the ground, the pilot announced that atmospheric
problems in Millhaven meant that our flight was being diverted to
Milwaukee, where we could either wait until conditions improved or
arrange for connecting flights.

At about a
quarter to seven, we touched down at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, where
another cheerful blond person told us that if we remained in the
departure lounge, we would be able to reboard and continue on to our
original destination in no less than an hour. I had lost faith in
cheerful blond persons and walked through the departure lounge, trudged
along a series of corridors, took an escalator downstairs, and rented
another car. This one was a gunmetal gray Ford Galaxy, and all it
smelled of was new leather. They spray it into the cars, like air
freshener.

South of
Milwaukee, the city flattens out into miles of suburbs and then yields
to the open farmland of the original Midwest. After I crossed the
border into Illinois, the sunlight still fell on the broad
green-and-yellow fields, and the billboards advertised high-yield
fertilizer and super-effective crop spray. Herds of Holstein cows stood
unmoving in vast pastures. Fifteen miles farther, the air darkened; and
a little while after that, wisps and tendrils of fog floated between
the cars ahead of me. Then the fields disappeared into misty gray. I
turned on my fog lights when a Jeep Cherokee two hundred feet down the
highway turned into a pair of tiny red eyes. After that, we crawled
along at thirty miles an hour. The first Millhaven exit jumped up out
of the emptiness barely in time for me to make the turn. After that,
the ten-minute drive to the airport took half an hour, and it was
seven-thirty before I found the rental parking spaces. I went into the
terminal, turned over the keys, and walked back across the access road
and down a long stretch of pavement to the long-term parking garage.

On the second
floor, twenty or thirty cars stood parked at wide intervals on the gray
cement. Overhead bulbs in metal cages shone down on cement pillars and
bright yellow lines. The exit signs glowed red across empty space. I
turned on the Pontiac's lights and rolled toward the curving wall
before the ramp. Another pair of headlights shot out into the gloom.
When I stopped to pay the attendant, long yellow beams elongated on the
ramp behind me. The attendant handed back my change without looking at
me, and the gate floated up. I sped out of the garage and across the
pedestrian walkway, swerved onto the circular access road, and got up
to forty on the empty drive to the highway. I wanted to vanish into the
fog.

I paused at
the stop sign long enough to be sure that nothing was coming, cramped
the wheel, hit the accelerator and the horn at the same time, and cut
into the middle lane. A huge sign flashing
FOG
WARNING
25MPH
burned
toward me from the side of the road. As soon as I got up to fifty, the
taillights of a station wagon jumped toward me, and I swerved into the
fast lane before I rammed into the puzzled face of the Irish retriever
staring at me through the wagon's rear window. I whisked past the
wagon. I thought that if I drove Paul Fontaine-style for another mile
or two, I could put to rest the fear that Billy Ritz's replacement was
gaining on me, back in the fog. And then I thought that probably no one
was following me, cars drove out of the long-term garage night and day,
and I slowed to twenty-five miles an hour. Tail-lights appeared before
me in the fast lane, and I moved as slowly as a rowboat back into the
center lane. Then I began to imagine a thug creeping toward me out of
the sludge in my rearview mirror, and I moved the accelerator down
until I was nipping along at forty. It seemed dangerously slow. I
swerved around a little powder-blue hatchback that appeared in front of
me with vivid, dreamlike suddenness, and ploughed through the drifting
lengths and thicknesses of batting, of wool, of white gauze and gray
gauze, and whipped past another flashing red
FOG WARNING
sign. A pain I
had not felt in a good five years declared itself in a circle about
eight inches in diameter on the upper right side of my back.

I remembered
this pain, a combination of burn and puncture, though it is neither.
Generally speaking, it is the legacy of the metal fragments embedded in
my back, and specifically, the result of some flesh-encrusted screw,
some rusty bolt, working its way toward the air like a restless corpse.
I felt it now exactly in the place where Edward Hubbel, who had never
understood why he had been mesmerized by lines of seminaked boys, had
breathed on me while he scrutinized my scars. Edward Hubbel's breath
had seeped through my skin and awakened the sleeping bolt. Now it was
moving around, crawling toward the surface like Lazarus, where first a
sharp edge, then a blunt curl, would emerge. For a week, I'd print
spotty bloodstains on my shirts and sheets.

I slowed down
before I slammed into the back of a truck and puttered along behind it
while I tried rubbing my back on the seat. The truck picked up a little
speed. I could feel the exact dimension of the little hatchet buried at
the bottom of my shoulder blade. Pressing it against the seat seemed to
calm it. The painful circle on my back shrank by half an inch. I looked
into the rear-view mirror, saw nothing, and moved out to get around the
truck. A horn blared; brakes shrieked. I jammed the accelerator. The
Pontiac wavered ahead, and the massive wheels of the truck filled my
side window. The horn blasted again. The Pontiac made up its mind and
shot forward. The rear end of another car jumped into the windshield,
and I hauled the Pontiac into the fast lane with my heart skipping and
my mind in the clear empty space of panic. I never even ticked it. When
I saw red lights ahead of me, I slowed down and waited for my heart to
get back to normal. The screw in my back declared itself again. A few
other little knots and bumps began to throb. Hubbel had breathed them
all into wakefulness. Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, and I
sped up by another five miles an hour. The headlights grew larger and
sharper. I swung back into the middle lane.

The car
behind me came up alongside me and stuck with me for a long time. I
thought it must have been someone I had irritated or frightened during
my Fontaine phase. The other car drifted toward my lane, and I swerved
right far enough to put my tires on the yellow line. The other car
swerved with me. It was dark blue, pocked with brown primer, with
crumpled corrugations behind the headlight. I sped up; he sped up. I
slowed down; he slowed down. Now he was only inches from the side of my
car, and my heart began to trip again. I looked sideways at a curly
dark head, heavy bare shoulders, and a flash of gold. The other driver
was watching the front of the Pontiac. He moved his wheel, and his car
whapped into mine just above the left front tire.

I slammed
down the accelerator, and the Pontiac zoomed into the slow lane. There
was a screech of metal as he dug a long strip down my side. The Pontiac
jumped ahead. The other man raced up alongside to hit me again, and I
zagged sideways. The rows of warning lights at the back of another semi
zoomed toward me. When I saw its mudflaps, I swerved off the road and
shuddered onto gravel. I kept pace with the semi for half a mile,
telling myself that the other driver would think I had driven off the
road. The truck driver blasted his air horn. I was glad I didn't have
to hear what he was saying. Sooner or later, I was going to run into an
exit sign or a stalled car, so I edged forward until I could see past
the front of the cab, gunned the Pontiac, and scrambled back onto the
road. The truck driver gave another enraged blast of his air horn.

The dark blue
car swam up beside me again. This time he hit me hard enough to jolt my
hands off the wheel. The semi's headlights filled my rearview mirror.
The blue car veered away and then came back and ground against the side
of the Pontiac. If he got me to slow down, or if he jarred me into an
angle, the semi would flatten me. A calm little voice in the midst of
my panic said that Fontaine had learned that I had tickets to Tangent
and had someone watch the Pontiac until I came back. The same voice
told me that a couple of witnesses would testify that I had been
driving recklessly. The thug in the blue car would just disappear.

The semi's
enormous radiator filled my rearview mirror. It looked carnivorous. The
blue car swung into me again, and I fastened onto the wheel and slammed
into him, just for the satisfaction. Sparks flew up between us. I could
taste adrenaline. The big green rectangle of an exit sign took shape in
the fog ahead of me. I took my foot off the accelerator, yanked the
wheel to the right, and took off over the gravel. In seconds, I was
shuddering over bumpy ground. The steel posts of the sign flew past the
sides of the Pontiac, and the blue car sailed away into the fog only
feet away from the cab of the semi. I went bumping through weeds. The
bottom of the Pontiac scraped rock. Then a curb led down to the off
ramp, and I thumped down onto the roadbed, drove without seeing or
thinking for thirty seconds, pulled up at the stop sign, and started to
shake.