Costume Not Included (12 page)

  The preacher spread his hands. "In the end, it always comes down to faith."

  There was a silence for a while. Then Melda said, "We're going to have to think about this." She looked at Chesney and he nodded. "Think about it a lot."

  "I get the feeling," Hardacre said, "that they" – he pointed upwards again – "would like to see something happen soon."

  "Well maybe 'they' should be talking to the monkey, not the organ grinder." She put her hand on Chesney's. "No offense, sweetie."

  "None taken," he said.

 

The stack of glowing paper was back on the desk. Denby could see a corner of it if he squinted sideways through the keyhole. They were talking in there – arguing, really – the preacher and McCann, about faith and miracles and special effects. The study was big, the door maybe twenty feet from where they were seated in the conversation area. He couldn't hear clearly through the closed door, except when voices rose. He heard nothing about Mr Spandex. He was starting to wonder if this was a wild goose chase, or if maybe it was only a sideshow.

  Hardacre and his mistress genuinely thought they were dealing with an angel. What if the guy was a time traveler who used different disguises when he dealt with different people? Denby had seen a statistic somewhere that said that more than two thirds of twenty-first cen tury Americans believed in angels. If you were coming here from the future and didn't want to have to answer too many inconvenient questions, masquerading as a heavenly messenger would probably be a safe bet.

  The meeting in the study was winding up. Denby saw people rising to their feet. He got away from the keyhole, thinking quickly: if they were leaving, the shortest route to where they'd left the car was out the front door. He quick-footed it across the foyer and into the hallway that led to the kitchen, pressing himself against the wall just as he heard the study door open.

  Hardacre and the girlfriend were still talking, but it was scheduling talk. "I'll give you a call after we've talked it over," McCann was saying. Denby risked a peek around the corner and saw them moving toward the doors. The older woman had her hand on the kid's arm and was battering his ears with some fiercely whispered remarks that the policeman couldn't hear. But the nerd was not happy, his shoulders hunched, and now he pulled his arm free and said, "Mother, we've settled this." That made McCann turn her head and look over her shoulder. Denby pulled back out of sight.

  Then he heard the front door open and looked again. They were going outside, all of them, the older couple accompanying the younger down to where the cars were parked. The door to the study had been left open and Denby could see the glowing stack of paper on the desk. The temptation came, strong and sudden, and before he had time to think himself out of it, he was speeding across the foyer and into the room. He scooped up the manuscript, tucked it under his arm, and made like the running back TeShawn Bougaineville heading for a game-winning touchdown. Less than thirty seconds later he was in the screen of trees at the back end of the property, hurriedly collecting the field glasses and directional mike. Another five minutes, and he was driving on twolane blacktop toward the interstate, the glowing mass beside him on the front passenger seat.

 

"What did you think of it?" Melda asked Chesney, as they rolled north toward the city.

  "Some of it was based on things that I've really done," he said, "like when I saved you from the muggers. And when I rounded up the dope dealers."

  She kept her eyes on the road. "Yeah, but then it got weird. I mean, if you did go to the United Nations, what would you tell them?"

  Chesney shrugged. "Stop fighting. Stop hurting people. Figure out what the world really needs, then make it happen."

  "Exactly," Melda said. "It's not as if they don't already have people telling them that. They're just not listening, cause they've got other plans."

  "Would it make a difference if they thought I was a prophet?"

  "It would make some of them want to kill you on the spot – most because they'd think you were a dangerous faker, a few because they'd be afraid you were the real thing."

  "I don't want to get killed," Chesney said. He reached over and touched her thigh. "Especially not now."

  She covered his hand with hers. "No. So there's that. But then there's the other question: what if it worked? What if it really made the world a better place?"

  Chesney put his mind to that question. All he saw was darkness and indistinct shapes. "Would it?" he said. "The Reverend believes this kind of thing has happened before – a new book comes along and changes everything. But did that make things better? Is this a better world than the earlier drafts of the universe?"

  "He lets you think he believes that," Melda said. "One thing I know for sure is that he believes that when a new chapter starts, the old world ends, finito, case closed."

  "And that doesn't seem to bother him."

  "I don't think he believes it would end for him – especially if he's the guy who's writing the next chapter."

  "So who's to say," Chesney said, "that it's better for everybody else?"

  "Hardacre would say we'd have to take that on faith."

  Chesney's face hardened. "I don't do faith. I do numbers. Numbers don't cheat."

  "This is going to take some thinking," Melda said.

 

Lieutenant Denby pulled into a rest area after fifty miles. It was mid-afternoon and there were several cars in the parking area, plus some mobile homes and semi-trailers in the part reserved for heavy vehicles. Kids were playing around one of the picnic tables and a fat-bellied man was walking something on the end of a leash that looked like it ought to be on the end of a mop handle. The policeman rolled past to the end of the cars-only lot and pulled into the last bay. He cut the engine, looked around to see if anyone was likely to walk past him. When he saw nobody coming from any direction, he put the manuscript on his lap, propped against the steering wheel.

  The cover page read:
The Book of Chesney
, with no byline. He reached to turn to the first page of text, but as he did so the four words on the cover changed. Denby blinked and looked again. Now the words were in some strange script he had never seen before. Even as he examined the cursive marks and squiggles, they blurred and changed into some other form of writing, this one with dots and accents above some characters and others individually underlined.

  "What the…?" was the lieutenant's response, then the script changed again. He flipped to the first page of text, and saw the same effect. A thought occurred to him, and he put his nose close to the paper and sniffed. Nothing. But still he wondered if the paper might be imbued with some psychotropic substance – he was still leaning toward drugs as the answer to how all those people ended up in their underwear in Civic Plaza without knowing how they got there. And how come there were gaps in his own memory?

  As he thought about the drugs issue, the text changed again. Denby dug out his cell phone, turned it into a camera, and took a shot of the first page. A few seconds later, the lines blurred; when they came back into focus they were filled with wedge-shaped characters. Those rang a bell in the lieutenant's mind, something from a college course: Cunieform? he thought. He snapped another picture, then keyed the phone to show him the two photos.

  He saw two different scripts. When he looked at the page itself, he saw two parallel wavy lines and stick-figure drawings of a bird, a bee and a human hand. He recognized them as Egyptian hieroglyphics, just in time for them to become a string of zeroes and ones.

  Denby dumped the manuscript back on the passenger seat, repocketed his cell phone and started up the ghost car's engine. It was only then that he noticed that the paper wasn't glowing anymore.

 

It was dinner time when Chesney and Melda got back to his apartment. She fixed them a meal out of whatever she found in the cupboards and refrigerator: beef stroganoff with spicy salsa instead of ketchup in the sour cream sauce, because they were out of ketchup. It didn't taste bad, Chesney thought. Dinners with Melda were becoming another pool of light.

  They did the dishes together, then he said, "I was thinking of going crimefighting tonight. If there's any crime left out there."

  Melda rinsed a plate. "Maybe you should expand? Take on the terrorists?"

  He summoned his assistant and in a moment the demon was hovering beside him, cigar and glass of rum in their usual places. "Xaphan, can I go after terrorists?"

  "You mean as a crimefighter?"

  "Yes."

  The demon puffed reflectively. "Tricky question," it said. "Depends on what definition you use."

  "How about people who blow up innocent men, women and children?"

  The weasel brows went up and down. "There's a guy a few blocks from here."

  Chesney felt a pool of light spread around him. "What's he planning?"

  "To watch an old Lawrence Welk show on cable, then get to bed," said the demon. At Chesney's look of surprise, it went on, "The guy's ninety-two. Was a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force in 1943 when they set fire to Hamburg. All told, they killed forty thousand and a few more. I can't give you his personal score cause it was a joint enterprise."

  Chesney felt the pool of light shrink. "No," he said, "I mean a terrorist who's going to blow up innocent people in the future."

  "Which one?" said Xaphan.

  "How do I know which terrorist?"

  "No, I meant, which future?"

  "How many are there?"

  "It's a really big number," said the demon. "You don't have the words for it."

  The answer raised a question Chesney did not want to explore. It was surrounded by murk. "Are there terrorists planning to blow people up right now?"

  "Sure, lots."

  "Then let's go after them."

  "Can't."

  "Why not?"

  "They don't live around here." The demon released the cigar as if placing it in an invisible ashtray at about the level of its watch chain then made a small flourish with its free hand. A scroll of paper appeared in its stubbly fingers then unrolled. Xaphan let the screed unwind then said, "There."

  The scroll hung in the air while the demon pointed at an indented subparagraph. Chesney bent closer and read, "Territory: the territory shall be limited to the city in which the party of the first part is normally resident, its suburbs and the surrounding district, to a distance not to exceed ten miles beyond the farthest boundary of the city limits."

  "I don't remember that part," he said.

  "You were kinda excited at the time," Xaphan said, "but you said you wanted to fight crime in the city and that's what got put in the contract."

  "So there are no terrorists in the city?"

  "Not right now."

  "Will there be any in the future?"

  "Again," said the demon, "which future?"

  Chesney's pool of light had faded. "What about regular crime? Anything going on?"

  "There's some bank robbers passing through on their way north."

  "Are they robbing a bank here?"

  "Nah. They work in the south, live in the north."

  Chesney had begun to feel a pool of light; but already it was fading. "But they're criminals. So can I go after them anyway?"

  "Sure. They got the loot with 'em, so they're commitin' the crime of possession of stolen property. You can nail 'em."

  Chesney's pool of light brightened considerably.

 

Lieutenant Denby had stopped at a drive-in for a burger and fries before returning the ghost car to Police Central. He was passing the building's front side, heading for the ramp that led down to the parking garage, when a latemodel minivan descended from the sky and landed in the curbside no-parking zone at the bottom of the front steps. The vehicle didn't come down at speed, as if it had been dropped from the top of the building, but it hit hard enough to make a hubcap pop off – and certainly hard enough to shake up the four men who were hog-tied in the seats, their seat belts snug around them.

  Daubed on the side of the van, in green paint that was still wet and dripping onto the pavement, were the words:
Bank robbers from out of town
. In smaller print underneath:
PS: loot under rear seat.

  Denby stopped the ghost car and put on his flashers. Uniformed officers were already coming down the steps. The eyes of the bank robbers were very large. The lieutenant spotted Conyers, the patrol sergeant on night duty, at the top of the steps and said, "Book them, don't let them talk to each other. I'll want to question them first thing tomorrow."

 

Later, in bed, Chesney said, "I really enjoyed catching those juggers."

  "Juggers?" Melda said.

  "It's what Xaphan calls bank robbers."

  "Mmm," Melda said, snuggling against him, "I could tell you were in a good mood."

  "It all went very well." He turned toward her, stroking her belly. "Listen, I said you could be the one to work out what we should do," he said, "but as far as I'm concerned, I'm pretty happy just being a crimefighter."

  "When you're happy," she said, "I'm happy." A moment later she said, "But I'm still thinking about it."

  She lay there doing just that as his breathing told her he had fallen asleep. She didn't like the idea of Chesney as a prophet, especially if it meant being tied to the Reverend Billy Lee Hardacre. She'd seen him on TV, ripping a strip off some politician or rock star who had gone astray; she'd admit, at least to herself, that she'd sometimes stayed tuned, which made her not much better than any other spectator at a lynching, but that didn't mean she had to like the guy who tied the noose.