Dreamcatcher (82 page)

Surrender, Dorothy.

“Shut up!” Mr. Gray said. “Kiss my bender!” He put the Subaru in reverse and floored the accelerator. The motor howled, scaring birds up from the trees, but it was no good. The front wheels were caught
firmly, and the back wheels were up, spinning in the air.

“Fuck!”
Mr. Gray cried, and slammed Jonesy's fist down on the steering wheel.
“Jesus-Christ-bananas! Fuck me Freddy!”

He felt behind him for his pursuers and got nothing clear, only a sense of approach. Two groups of them, and the one that was closer had Duddits. Mr. Gray feared Duddits, sensed that he was the one most responsible for how absurdly, infuriatingly difficult this job had become. If he could stay ahead of Duddits, all would end well. It would help to know how close Duddits was, but they were blocking him—Duddits, Jonesy, and the one called Henry. The three of them together made a force Mr. Gray had never encountered before, and he was afraid.

“But I'm still enough ahead,” he told Jonesy, getting out. He slipped, uttered a Beaver-curse, then slammed the door shut. It was snowing again, great white flakes that filled the air like confetti and splashed against Jonesy's cheeks. Mr. Gray slogged around the back of the car, boots sliding and smooching in the mud. He paused for a moment to examine the corrugated silver back of the pipe rising from the bottom of the ditch which had trapped his car (he had also fallen victim in some degree to his host's mostly useless but infernally sticky curiosity), then went on around to the passenger door. “I'm going to beat your asshole friends quite handily.”

No answer to this goad, but he sensed Jonesy just as he sensed the others, Jonesy silent but still the bone in his throat.

Never mind him. Fuck him. The dog was the problem. The byrum was poised to come out. How to transport the dog?

Back into Jonesy's storage vault. For a moment there was nothing . . . and then an image from “Sunday School,” where Jonesy had gone as a child to learn about “God” and “God's only begotten son,” who appeared to be a byrum, creator of a byrus culture which Jonesy's mind identified simultaneously as “Christianity” and “bullshit.” The image was very clear, from a book called “the Holy Bible.” It showed “God's only begotten son” carrying a lamb—wearing it, almost. The lamb's front legs hung over one side of “begotten son's” chest, its rear legs over the other.

It would do.

Mr. Gray pulled out the sleeping dog and draped it around his neck. It was heavy already—Jonesy's muscles were stupidly, infuriatingly weak—and it would be much worse by the time he got where he was going . . . but he
would
get there.

He set off up East Street through the thickening snow, wearing the sleeping border collie like a fur stole.

2

The new snow was extremely slippery, and once they were on Route 32, Freddy was forced to drop his speed back to forty. Kurtz felt like howling with frustration. Worse, Perlmutter was slipping away from him, into something like a semi-coma. And this at a
time, goddam him, when he had suddenly been able to read the one Owen and his new friends were after, the one they called Mr. Gray.

“He's too busy to hide,” Pearly said. He spoke dreamily, like someone on the edge of sleep. “He's afraid. I don't know about Underhill, boss, but Jonesy . . . Henry . . . Duddits . . . he's afraid of them. And he's right to be afraid. They killed Richie.”

“Who's Richie, buck?” Kurtz didn't give much of a squirt, but he wanted Perlmutter to stay awake. He sensed they were coming to a place where he wouldn't need Perlmutter anymore, but for now he still did.

“Don't . . . know . . .” The last word became a snore. The Humvee skidded almost sideways. Freddy cursed, fought the wheel, and managed to regain control just before the Hummer hit the ditch. Kurtz took no notice. He leaned over the seat and slapped Perlmutter on the side of the face, hard. As he did so, they passed the store with the sign reading
BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT
? in the window.

“Owwww!”
Pearly's eyes fluttered open. The whites were now yellowish. Kurtz cared about this no more than he cared about Richie.
“Dooon't, boss . . .”

“Where are they now?”

“The water,” Pearly said. His voice was weak, that of a petulant invalid. The belly under his coat was a distended, occasionally twitching mountain.
Ma Joad in her ninth month, God bless and keep us,
Kurtz thought. “The waaaa . . .”

His eyes closed again. Kurtz drew his hand back to slap.

“Let him sleep,” Freddy said.

Kurtz looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“It's got to be the Reservoir he means. And if it is, we don't need him anymore.” He pointed through the windshield at the tracks of the few cars that had been out this afternoon ahead of them on Route 32. They were black and stark against the fall of fresh white snow. “There won't be anyone up there today but us, boss. Just us.”

“Praise God.” Kurtz sat back, picked his nine-millimeter up off the seat, looked at it, and put it back in its holster. “Tell me something, Freddy.”

“I will if I can.”

“When this is over, how does Mexico sound to you?”

“Good. As long as we don't drink the water.”

Kurtz burst out laughing and patted Freddy on the shoulder. Beside Freddy, Archie Perlmutter slipped deeper into coma. Inside his lower intestine, in that rich dump of discarded food and worn-out dead cells, something for the first time opened its black eyes.

3

Two stone posts marked the entrance to the vast acreage surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir. Beyond them, the road closed down to what was essentially a single lane, and Henry had a sense of having come full circle. It wasn't Massachusetts, but Maine, and although the sign said Quabbin Access, it was really
the Deep Cut Road all over again. He actually found himself looking up at the leaden sky, half-expecting to see the dancing lights. What he saw instead was a bald eagle, soaring almost close enough to touch. It landed on the lower branch of a pine tree and watched them go by.

Duddits raised his head from where it had lain against the cool glass and said, “Isser Ay walkin now.”

Henry's heart leaped. “Owen, did you hear?”

“I heard,” Owen said, and pressed the Humvee a little harder. The wet snow beneath them was as treacherous as ice, and with the state roads behind them, there was now only a single set of tracks leading north toward the Reservoir.

We'll be leaving our own set,
Henry thought.
If Kurtz gets this far, he won't need telepathy.

Duddits groaned, clutched his middle, and shivered all over. “Ennie, I sick. Duddits sick.”

Henry brushed Duddits's hairless brow, not liking the heat of the skin. What came next? Seizures, probably. A big one might take Duds off in a hurry, given his weakened condition, and God knew that might be a mercy. The best thing. Still, it hurt to think of it. Henry Devlin, the potential suicide. And instead of him, the darkness had swallowed his friends, one by one.

“You hang in there, Duds. Almost done now.” But he had an idea the toughest part might still be ahead.

Duddits's eyes opened again. “Isser Ay—ot
tuck.
”

“What?” Owen asked. “I didn't get that one.”

“He says Mr. Gray got stuck,” Henry said, still
brushing Duddits's brow. Wishing there was hair to brush, and remembering when there had been. Duddits's fine blond hair. His crying had hurt them, had chopped into their heads like a dull blade, but how happy his laughter had made them—you heard Duddits Cavell laugh and for a little while you believed the old lies again: that life was good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, had some purpose. That there was light as well as darkness.

“Why doesn't he just throw the goddam dog into the Reservoir?” Owen asked. His voice cracked with weariness. “Why does he feel he has to go all the way to this Shaft 12? Is it just because the Russian woman did?”

“I don't think the Reservoir is sure enough for him,” Henry said. “The Standpipe would have been good, but the aqueduct is even better. It's an intestine sixty-five miles long. And Shaft 12 is the throat. Duddits, can we catch him?”

Duddits looked at him from his exhausted eyes, then shook his head. Owen pounded his own thigh in frustration. Duddits wet his lips. Spoke two words in a hoarse near-whisper. Owen heard them but couldn't make them out.

“What? What did he say?”

“ ‘Only Jonesy.' ”

“What does that mean? Only Jonesy what?”

“Only Jonesy can stop him, I guess.”

The Hummer skidded again and Henry grabbed hold of the seat. A cold hand closed over his. Duddits was looking at him with desperate intensity. He tried to speak and began coughing instead, gruesome wet
hacking sounds. Some of the blood that came out of his mouth was markedly lighter, frothy and almost pink. Henry thought it was lung-blood. And even while the coughs shook him, Duddits's grip on Henry's hand didn't loosen.

“Think it to me,” Henry said. “Can you think it to me, Duds?”

For a moment there was nothing but Duddits's cold hand closed over his, Duddits's eyes locked on his. Then Duddits and the khaki interior of the Humvee, with its faded scent of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes, was gone. In its place Henry sees a pay telephone—the old-fashioned kind with different-sized holes on top, one for quarters, one for dimes, one for nickels. The rumble of men's voices and a clack-clacking sound, hauntingly familiar. After a moment he realizes it's the sound of checkers on a checkerboard. He's looking at the pay phone in Gosselin's, the one from which they called Duddits after the death of Richie Grenadeau. Jonesy made the actual call, because he was the only one with a phone he could bill it to. The others gathered around, all of them still with their jackets on because it was so cold in the store, even living in the big woods with trees all around him, Old Man Gosselin wouldn't throw an extra log in the stove, what a fuckin pisser. There are two signs over the phone. One reads
PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS.
The other one—

There was a crunching bang. Duddits was thrown against the back of Henry's seat and Henry was thrown into the dashboard. Their hands parted. Owen had
skidded off the road and into the ditch. Ahead of them, the Subaru's tracks, fading now under fresh cover, ran off into the thickening snow.

“Henry! You all right?”

“Yeah. Duds? Okay?”

Duddits nodded, but the cheek he had struck was turning black with amazing speed. Your Leukemia at Work for You.

Owen dropped the Humvee's transmission into low range and began to creep up the ditch. The Humvee was canted at a severe angle—maybe thirty degrees—but it rolled pretty well once Owen got it moving.

“Fasten your seatbelt. First fasten his, though.”

“He was trying to tell me s—”

“I don't give a damn what he was trying to tell you. This time we were all right, next time we could roll three-sixty. Fasten his belt, then your own.”

Henry did as he was told, thinking about the other sign over the pay phone. What had it said? Something about Jonesy. Only Jonesy could stop Mr. Gray now, that was the Gospel According to Duddits.

What had that other sign said?

4

Owen was forced to drop his speed to twenty. It made him crazy to creep like this, but the wet snow was falling furiously now and visibility was back to nearly zero.

Just before the Subaru's tracks disappeared entirely they came to the car itself, nose-down in a
water-carved ditch running across the road, passenger door open, rear wheels in the air.

Owen stepped on the emergency brake, drew his Glock, opened his door. “Stay here, Henry,” he said, and got out. He ran to the Subaru, bent low.

Henry unlatched his seatbelt and turned to Duddits, who was now sprawled against the back seat, gasping for breath, held in a sitting position only by the seatbelt. One cheek was a waxy yellow; the other had been engulfed by spreading blood under the skin. His nose was bleeding again, the wads of cotton sticking out of the nostrils soaked and dripping.

“Duds, I'm so sorry,” Henry said. “This is a fuckarow.”

Duddits nodded, then raised his arms. He could only hold them up for a few seconds, but to Henry his meaning seemed obvious enough. Henry opened his door and got out just as Owen came running back, his Glock now stuffed in his belt. The air was so thick with snow, the individual flakes so huge, that breathing had become difficult.

“I thought I told you to stay where you were,” Owen said.

“I only want to get in the back with him.”

“Why?”

Henry spoke calmly enough, although his voice trembled slightly. “Because he's dying,” he said. “He's dying, but I think he has one more thing to tell me first.”

5

Owen looked in the rearview mirror, saw Henry with his arms around Duddits, saw they were both wearing their seatbelts, and fastened his own.

“Hold him good,” he said. “There's going to be a hell of a jounce.”

He reversed a hundred feet, put the Hummer in low, and drove forward, aiming for the spot between the abandoned Subaru and the righthand ditch. The crack in the road looked a little narrower on that side.

There was indeed a hell of a jounce. Owen's seatbelt locked and he saw Duddits's body leap in Henry's arms. Duddits's bald head bounced against Henry's chest. Then they were over the crack and once more rolling up East Street. Owen could just make out the last phantom shapes of shoeprints on the now-white ribbon of the road. Mr. Gray was on foot and they were still rolling. If they could catch up before the bastard cut into the woods—

But they didn't.

6