The Waiting Room (28 page)

I said to Whelan, "I think you'd better stop the car."

"Why?" he asked.

"For your own good, you'd better stop the car, Mr. Whelan."

"That's not a threat, is it? I don't like threats; they give me asthma."

I shook my head. "No, it's not a threat. It's just that there's someone—" Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement in the back seat; I looked. The woman in red had raised her hands and was moving her upper body with aching, stiff slowness toward Whelan. "Jesus," I screamed at her, "no, for God's sake!" She continued moving her upper body forward, arms outstretched, fingers spread wide, that wretched, murderous smile stuck on her mouth.

Whelan said, "What in the fuck is
wrong
with you?"

"You'll kill us both!" I screamed at the woman in red.

"No, I won't!" Whelan protested.

"He's driving!" I screamed. "He'll go off the damned road!"

The woman hesitated. Her murderous smile altered, as if she was thinking about what I'd just said. She cocked her head toward me, then, with equal slowness, settled back and let her hands fall to her lap. Her murderous, expectant smile returned.

"You're a crazy man," Whelan snapped. He'd lost the classical station and had found a station that was playing big band music.

I said, "Yes, I know. I'm sorry. It's just that
I
. . .
see things." I looked quickly at the woman in red, saw her hands rise again. I said stiffly to her, "You'll kill
both
of us, dammit!" Her hands lowered.

Whelan said, "We all see things, Mr. Feary. I hope that the things you see are pleasant." This sounded strangely philosophical, I thought, for a man who was trying hard to cultivate a hard-boiled-former-detective persona.

"Not all the time," I said, and added, "We'd better drive straight through to Brookfield, Mr. Whelan."

"No problem," he said, "it's only twenty-five miles."

I glanced again at the woman in red. She was sitting very stiff and still, that awful smile stuck on her mouth. I looked out the back window at the LTD; it was still a precise five car lengths behind the Chevette. I looked at Whelan. I said, "I'd give anything to be somewhere else right now."

"Yeah," he said gloomily. "Florida."

"Bangor," I said.
"1962."

~ * ~

We had to stop eventually, I realized. But he did it so quickly that I had precious little time to react.

"Nature calls," he said, and pulled the Chevette onto the shoulder of the narrow road. A white sign with black letters a hundred feet ahead read "TOWNSHIP OF BROOKFIELD.

Behind us, the LTD stopped five car lengths back.

In the rear seat of the Chevette the woman in red moved her upper body inexorably forward, arms out-stretched, fingers wide. Her murderous grin was now a leer. Whelan opened his door.

My arm shot across the seat, over Whelan's lap. I grabbed the door handle and slammed the door shut. It didn't close; I'd shut some of his overcoat in it. He looked at me, frightened. He began to wheeze.

The woman in red had the collar of his coat in her hand now. I said to him, nodding at her fingers, my words slow and measured, "Do you
see
that, Mr. Whelan?"

He said nothing. He continued wheezing.

I took a deep breath. "Mr. Whelan," I said, "please listen to me." The hands of the woman crept forward spiderlike over his collar and found the sides of his neck. "You
must
continue driving. Please continue driving!"

He said nothing. His wheezing was very bad now.

I asked, "Where's your inhaler, Mr. Whelan?"

He thumped his right-hand coat pocket with his open hand. I reached in, found his inhaler, held it up to his mouth. The fingers of the woman in red were at the front of his throat now. I squeezed the inhaler once, then again, and again. He waved frantically in the air. I pulled the inhaler away. His wheezing stopped. He started choking, as if he had a piece of meat caught in his throat. "Drive!" I screamed. He continued choking. I reached out, grabbed the arm of the woman in red. It was like grabbing a steel pipe. I let go. Whelan continued to choke. He tumbled forward; his head hit the steering wheel, the horn sounded. The woman in red came forward with him, so the back of the bucket seat cut into her stomach and her head pushed into the area just above the windshield. "Stop it!" I screamed. "For God's sake, stop it!"

Whelan's choking grew quieter; he was beginning to gurgle.

"Oh, shit, shit, goddammit!" I breathed. I aimed the inhaler at the woman in red and squeezed.

The scream that came from her was pitiful, like the scream a rabbit makes when it dies. She folded backward, like an accordion, into the back seat. Her body began to liquefy just as it had in my apartment a billion years ago—and at last there was only a small dark pool on the seat. The pool evaporated quickly.

And I realized all at once what had happened. I had shown her that her murderous love for me was unrequited. So she went away.

~ * ~

Whelan came around by and by, and after clearing his throat for several minutes, and a couple of applications of the asthma inhaler, he said, "Peed my pants, anyway," and pulled back onto the road, the LTD dogging us.

"Do you have any idea what was happening to you back there?" I asked.

"Yeah," he answered, "I had a fucking asthma attack, a fucking doozie of an asthma attack." "No," I whispered.

"I didn't hear you, Mr. Feary."

"Nothing," I said. "Call me Sam."

"Okay. Call me Mr. Whelan. Everybody does. My first name's Kennedy, but I hate it, so even my girlfriends call me Mr. Whelan."

"Sure," I said. "Mr. Whelan."

We were on the main street of Brookfield less than a minute later.

Brookfield—what I could see of it at twelve-thirty in the morning—was very small. A hamlet. Maybe thirty-five houses total, most of them whitish two-story Victorian. There was also a big brick Presbyterian Church, a Sunoco station, a grange hall, a small restaurant called Hattie's Brookfield Restaurant, and a tiny post office.

The village's main street was empty. There were no lights on in any of the houses, and only one street-lamp, a modern, expressway-type arc light on a long, curving aluminum pole that looked very much out of place in the village. It cast a wide, ragged circle of bluish light on the sidewalk in front of the grange hall.

"Kind of a bust," I said.

And Whelan, who had pulled the Chevette over so we were in front of the post office, said, "Abner Cray lives here somewhere, does he?"

I nodded. "Yes. Somewhere."

"But you don't know where?"

I shrugged. "I haven't a clue."

He chuckled a little. "Not much of a detective, are you, Mr. Feary?"

The LTD had pulled up five car lengths behind us. Its lights were off. I said to Whelan, "So what do we do now?"

"What
can
we do?" he answered. "We wait until morning."

"Here?" I was incredulous. "In the car?"

He jiggled with something on the side of his seat and the seat went back to a reclining position, which gave me a shudder, because his head was now where the woman in red's lap had been. "Sure," he said. "If you have to, you can sleep anywhere, Sam."

But I couldn't sleep, though I marveled at the fact that he could. He nodded off within seconds and—predictably, considering his asthma—began to snore resonantly.

I got out of the Chevette, closed the door, and stood facing the LTD in the darkness.

It flashed its lights at me.

I sighed. "I'm sorry, my friend," I whispered, "but I'm afraid too much water has gone under the bridge. You're no fun anymore."

It flashed its lights again. I shook my head at it, turned, and walked up the street, toward the grange hall.

~ * ~

I expected that the LTD would follow me. It did. I heard its old gears mesh, heard that big engine pull it
forward, and when I glanced back it was just passing the Chevette. It slowed and stopped a dozen feet in front of Whelan's car. Its gears meshed again, and it backed up slowly. I lifted my arm; I was going to yell, "Whelan, watch out!" but the LTD stopped, came forward, and halted five car lengths from me, just inside the circle of bluish light cast by the big arc lamp.

I strained to see the driver but saw only what I'd seen four of five hours before—someone hunched over the wheel, someone tall enough that the top of his head intersected the top of the windshield. And, as Whelan had told me, he was wearing a gray suit—a suit that looked achingly familiar. I saw others in the car, too—several dark shapes behind the tinted windshield, one in front, a couple more in back.

Surprising myself, I took three or four quick steps toward the car. I caught the driver off guard, I think, because he didn't put the LTD in reverse and begin backing away until I'd stopped walking. But I'd gotten close enough. I'd seen the driver.

Whelan had been right. It wasn't Art DeGraff.

It was the old man on the subway, the one that the woman in red had choked the friendliness out of, and when our eyes met, there on Brookfield's main street, he gave me a wide, gloating grin that said very clearly, "And now you'll get yours, Bozo!"

"Jesus," I whispered. "I'm sorry." I looked quickly away from those accusing eyes and into the back seat of the LTD.

Art DeGraff was there, in the middle of the back
seat, his body squashed into a fetal position, his huge black oval eyes in that long oval white face peering out from what looked like a form-fitting dark hood. It was a face that had anger etched hard into it, the way the bark of an old tree is etched with the furrows of age.

I froze. That face, that living mask of anger, knew that I had seen it.

I heard it scream as the LTD backed away, out of the glow of the arc lamp in front of the grange hall. It was a scream of awful and bitter recognition—
This
is what I am,
it said.
This is the thing I have become. And now the world knows it!

That was the first and last time I felt sympathy for Art DeGraff.

~ * ~

I ran back to the Chevette. Whelan was snoring happily when I got there. I figured he was safer with me around, or that I was safer with him around. I wasn't sure which. We were safer together, I knew that.

The LTD, which had backed down the street and into the darkness, took its position five car lengths behind the Chevette, lights off, and for a good half hour I sat turned in the seat so I could keep an eye on it. At last I decided that sitting like that was only giving me a pain in the neck. So I put my seat back and I fell asleep.

~ *~

It was the smell of coffee that woke me. Whelan was holding a plastic cup of it near my nose. "Wake up," he said, "we got work to do."

I became aware of sunlight on me first, then of the sounds of people and traffic around us. I was also aware that I had a hell of a headache.

I sat up, leaving the seat back, and pressed my hands hard to the sides of my head. "Dammit!" I breathed.

"Take this," Whelan said, and he put the cup of coffee under my nose. It smelled good. I took a sip. It was very hot.

"He's in the Ford," I said, my gaze on the dark area below the dashboard because the sunlight was too bright.

"Art DeGraff?" asked Whelan. "No, I told you: the driver—"

"He's in the back seat," I said, sipped the coffee, then chanced a look around. People dressed for midspring—in jackets and sweaters and an occasional hat—were coming and going from Hattie's Brookfield Restaurant and a small general store called Pete's Groceries and Things, which I hadn't noticed the night before. "What time is it?" I asked.

"About eight," Whelan answered. "Seven forty-five, actually."

"Seven forty-five?" I said, surprised that the whole town had, from the looks of things, been awake for at least an hour.

Whelan asked, "What do you mean Art DeGraff was in the back seat?"

I nodded. "He was. I saw him. He was sitting in the back seat, in the middle of the back seat."

"Oh?" Whelan said. "When?"

"Last night. After you fell asleep."

"Yes," Whelan said. "I see." Clearly his professional ego had been bruised. He, the hard-bitten former cop, had declared that Art DeGraff was not in the Ford, and he'd been proved wrong. "Well, it's not there anymore," he went on, and nodded at the rearview mirror.

I turned around in the seat. There was a green pickup truck behind us, a big yellow dog looking at me through its windshield, and, behind that, a black and gold Chevy Blazer. But no LTD. I turned back, sighed, sipped my coffee. "Good coffee," I said.

"I'll put it on your tab," he said.

"Now what?" I said.

"Now I get a sweet roll. You want one?"

I smiled at him. I was beginning to like him. "I'll pay," I said, fished my wallet out, and got a dollar from it. To my surprise, he took it.