Costume Not Included (17 page)

  "Poker's my game," Chesney said, "but no offense taken."

  The reference to poker seemed to call up some vague association in the policeman's mind, because he paused for a moment as if trying to remember something. Then he shook his head and went back to what he'd been talking about. He said to Melda, "I figure you for the greatgreat-whatever grandmother. That's why he rescued you twice – it had something to do with you two getting together, so that someday, all the way down the line, he would be born."

  Melda moved her head in a
could-be
motion.

  "Now," Denby said, "we come to the why. And there, I'm still in the dark. It's got something to do with crime. Maybe if the guy in the costume–"

  "He's called the Actionary," Chesney said.

  "All right, the Actionary. Maybe if he can prevent some crime here in the city, or maybe take some bad guy out of circulation, that's going to change the future. Maybe it even stops the big bad whatever-it-is from wrecking the world."

  "And the angel?" Melda said.

  Denby threw up his hands. "I don't know. Some religious movement, some cult that Hardacre starts – maybe it's got something to do with how the future turns out. The guy's trying to influence it, make it change direction, or kill it in the cradle." He looked at Chesney. "Again, no offense, kid, but I don't see you as any kind of prophet."

  "Me neither."

  Chesney could tell that Denby was waiting to see if either of them would add something to his scenario. They had agreed that Melda would take the lead in this conversation. The young man had read enough time-travel stories – the Freedom Five had once battled an alien invasion from a future Earth – to know that the concept was full of paradoxes and wild ideas that chased and ate their own tails like demented snakes. But he didn't want to put the policeman off the false trail.

  Denby said, "So what do you say?"

  "As little as possible," said Melda.

  "But I'm close?"

  Melda gave him an eyebrow shrug and said, "We can't tell you. We decided to bring you in because you were getting to be a problem and because we thought you could help." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "And also because you didn't deserve to wreck your career."

  "I get it," the captain said, "you can't tell me too much because what I know could change the future. That's why you destroyed the book."

  "I'm not saying we did," said Melda, "and I'm not saying we didn't. But work with us and we'll do what we have to do, and you'll get to bust a lot of bad guys."

  "You won't hurt innocent people?"

  "We haven't yet," she said, while Chesney chimed in, saying, "Never."

  Denby nodded. "And the future?"

  "It'll take care of itself," Melda said. "Any other questions?"

  "Yeah," said the captain. "Where do we go from here?"

  "The Actionary," said Melda, "sets his own timetable. So don't call us. We'll call you."

  Denby showed them the smile of a man who was not entirely sure what he was getting into, but was willing to give it a try. "Okay," he said, "but one question: I don't have to dress up in spandex, right?"

  "It's not–" Chesney began, but Melda cut him off.

  "It really isn't spandex," Melda said, "and, no, a costume is not included in the deal."

 

"I'm not sure about him," Chesney said as they walked along the river bank. Chesney liked to be able to put people into definite categories. As a policeman, Captain Denby ought to be in the general category of "good guy," but he had stolen the
Book of Chesney
from Billy Lee Hardacre's house, and burglary was unavoidably a "bad guy" action.

  "You ever hear the line about how, with some guys, it's better to have them inside the tent pissing out," Melda said, "instead of outside the tent pissing in?"

  Chesney was not good with metaphors. They never occurred to him and he never remembered them. "I don't think so," he said.

  She took his arm and hugged it against the side of her breast. "We've just arranged to have a dry tent," she said. "Besides, he's a good cop, and he knows the city. He'll be better at picking good targets than your other assistant."

  "If he's really on our side."

  "He will be," Melda said, "because we'll be on his."

 

Just before quitting time, Chesney received another summons to Seth Baccala's office.

  "What do you know about time travel?" the executive assistant asked.

  "Wouldn't work," Chesney said. "Too many possible futures."

  "What?"

  "That's what I've heard."

  "What about travel into the past?"

  "I think that's possible."

  Baccala stared at him. Chesney didn't read the prolonged scrutiny as hostile – just puzzled, with an undercurrent of worry. After a while, the other man said, "That's all."

  Chesney went to the door. As he opened it, Baccala said, "Arnstruther?"

  He turned. "Yes?"

  But the executive assistant shook his head again. "Never mind."

 

Melda phoned Billy Lee Hardacre from Chesney's apartment after supper. "You don't have to worry about the book," she said. "It got turned into ashes."

  "He didn't read it?"

  "He couldn't. It kept changing from one language to another."

  "Is he going to continue to be a problem?" the preacher said.

  "No. He's going to work with us on the crimefighting."

  "You're not going to introduce him to Chesney's little helper?"

  "No," said Melda. "Although, actually, they've already met. Captain Denby just doesn't remember it."

  "Captain?"

  "He's moving up."

  There was a pause. Melda thought it was a sign that

Hardacre was about to switch tracks, and she was not surprised when the next thing he said was, "So, what about your young friend? Has he made up his mind?"

  "You mean about becoming the prophet Chesney? What's that word you lawyers use, abey-something?"

  "Abeyance?"

  "That's sort of like Limbo, right?"

  "Sort of."

  "Well," she said, "that's where it is."

 

And so was Chesney.

  The Devil had not sent Xaphan to summon Chesney this time. Instead, when the young man rode the elevator down from his office on the fourth floor of the Paxton Building and the doors opened, he stepped out not into the lobby but into that amorphous region of mists that had once been the resting place of innocent souls who had died
in utero
or in infancy before baptism.

  Lucifer was waiting for him, arms folded, foot tapping. "I didn't hear back from you," the Devil said.

  "I didn't have anything to say to you. I still don't." Chesney was hungry and his mind was still trying to work out the meaning of the expression he had seen on Seth Baccala's face when they had parted. "I agreed to nothing," he said. "Besides, you went ahead and had Denby steal the book."

  "You reasoned that out? Well done," said Satan.

  "It was obvious."

  "Lit by a pool of light."

  "Never mind that," Chesney said. "I take it you couldn't read the book. Denby said it kept changing languages."

  "I speak and read all languages," the Devil said.

  "Actually, I speak and read the one true language, which all beings hear and understand as their mother tongue. But, the book had played its part. Things had moved on."

  "Moved on where?"

  Satan didn't answer. Instead he asked a question of his own. "Have you decided whether to take up Hardacre's offer?"

  "Melda and I have agreed that she will make the decision as to what I do about it. I can tell you now I have no interest in being a prophet. Nor will I do the things the book says I did."

  "You'll let the woman decide?" said Lucifer. "Interesting."

  Chesney, graduate of umpteen childhood hours spent in his mother's Sunday school, caught the association. "If you try to tempt her…" he said.

  "Under our agreement, I'm not allowed to tempt her in any manner that involves you. Even if I were, Melda McCann is no Eve. I'm happy to let her nature run its course."

  "What do you mean, her nature?"

  "That's for you to discover. What I'm telling you is that I will leave her alone."

  "And that's the truth?" Chesney said.

  "What is truth," said the Devil, "if Himself keeps rewriting it?"

  And then he was gone, along with the mists. Chesney was standing in the lobby of the Paxton Building.

  "You all right?" said the guard at the security desk.

  "Too early to say," Chesney said.

 

The Taxidermist created a lot of work for Captain Denby. To begin with, the victims had to be identified, which meant combing through missing persons files for the past several years. The perpetrator's name was Wendell Throop and he had been a truck driver most of his life; for the past twenty-one years he had driven for a major supermarket chain. The assumption was that he had picked up his victims along the highways he had driven between the company's central warehouse here in the city and its larger distribution centers in the surrounding states.

  Throop himself wasn't saying anything. The shock of the Lexus bursting into his private world had snapped some link in his already fragile mind, and he was spending most of his time sitting in a cell and staring at the wall. A court-ordered lawyer had had no more luck getting a response than Denby.

  But the pieces were falling into place. The captain had now tentatively identified six of the victims – five males and one female – and was arranging for DNA samples from the families to corroborate his suppositions. While he plowed through the grunt work that made up most of a policeman's day, his mind kept turning to the other mystery that now occupied center stage in his life.

  We'll call you, Melda McCann had said. Denby's eye kept slipping from the paperwork on his desk to the multi-line phone off to one side. Every time he saw one of the button-lights start to flash, he felt a little tension draw his shoulder blades together. But then the buzzer in his phone wouldn't sound, or if it did, the call would have something to do with the Taxidermist.

  Mustn't be greedy, he told himself, and went back to comparing the crime scene photos of the stuffed bodies with the photos and descriptions of missing persons that were still coming in by the hundreds.

• • • •

"I'm leaning toward you should maybe try it," Melda said to Chesney.

  The young man moved his shoulders in a silent display of discomfort. "I'm not a prophet," he said.

  "You don't have to wear a white robe and grow a beard," she said. "Cause, after all, it's not you who would be the one up there on the stage. It would be the Actionary."

  Chesney put that thought in the middle of the screen in his mind and looked at it. It was less disturbing than the prospect of having to meet with world leaders or give speeches and sermons. "So it would be the
Book of the Actionary?"

  "That's what I'm thinking. You'd be in costume, in your crimefighting identity. You'd come on the reverend's show, say a few words–"

  "What words?" Chesney had never cared for the idea of public speaking. It was just about the darkest, murkiest shadowland he could envision.

  "We'll work that out with the reverend," Melda said. They were sitting on the couch in his apartment, and she put a hand over his two, which were clasped together on his thighs. The warmth of her palm soothed him.

  "The thing is," she went on, "right now you're doing good work catching bad guys like that awful man who killed the hitchhikers. But how many people are you reaching?"

  "How many do I need to reach?"

  "Well, imagine if you could stop people – young people, especially – from becoming criminals in the first place. Think of all the crimes you could prevent, and all the victims who wouldn't suffer, because they'd never
be
victims." She squeezed both his hands in hers. "Because of you."

  It sounded less frightening. "Oh," he said.

  "Every week, you could solve some big crime," she said. "Then you come on the TV and talk about the lessons learned."

  "Like crime does not pay."

  "Yeah. Or how so many of the big bad guys started out doing little bad stuff. So you tell them, don't steal candy, Johnny, because it will only get you twenty-to-life in the slammer."

  "That doesn't sound too bad," Chesney said. He remembered the episode where Malc Turner busted up a ring of fur thieves. He described to Melda how some kids had watched him throw the perps into the back of his truck. And he stopped to tell them, "This is where the road of crime leads to."

  Melda squeezed his hands again. "You could have a fan club, send out autographed pictures." The idea did not appeal; he saw himself sitting at a desk, signing hundreds of photographs, hour after hour, addressing envelopes, licking and sealing. It reminded him of all the years he had been his mother's helper, as she deluged newspaper editors, politicians and errant celebrities with her scathing epistles.

  Melda must have sensed something, because she said, "You'd only have to sign one, then Xaphan could do all the rest."

  Chesney still didn't like the idea, but he wanted to please her. "I suppose that would be okay. It would be part of being a crimefighter. Preventive crimefighting."

  "So, what do you think?" she said, putting a hand on his cheek to turn his face to hers. "I know we said I would make the decision, but it has to be something you're comfortable with."

  Chesney put his mind to the question. As he expected, prophethood still refused to become the center of a pool of pure light. It was like peering through a smeared window at a storm-darkened landscape, where the wind was preventing anything from staying still and holding a clearly defined shape. He was reminded of the outer circle of Hell, where he had faced down Nat Blowdell, a memory that reminded him of Lucifer, which led him to their last meeting. And that brought a new thought.