Mysterium (18 page)

The alley behind the Cantwell house passed between tar paper garages and the brittle remains of vegetable gardens. The paving was ancient and frost-cracked. Set back on each side, wood-frame houses slept behind wooden siding, screen doors, peeling shingles. Lights were sparse. Dex carried a crowbar in his right hand and resisted a juvenile impulse to bang it against these fence slats.

Howard stalked ahead in long, nervous strides. He wants this over with, Dex thought. But caution: caution was vital.

They walked downhill in the deepest shadows and stopped where the alleyway opened onto Oak Street.

Crossing Oak was going to be the hard part, the big question mark. Oak Street divided the town from east to west and had once carried most of the traffic to the cement plant and the quarries. It had been widened last year and lamp standards had been planted every ten yards. The light was surgically bright. Worse, the road intersected every commercial street including Beacon; a car might turn any corner for four blocks in either direction without warning. The road was an asphalt desert, much too wide and as hospitable as a guillotine. The wind came down that avenue in frigid torrents.

“We should cross one at a time,” Howard whispered. “From the other side you can see more of the intersection,” pointing to Beacon a block away where a traffic light rattled in a cold gust. “Then, if it seems safe, wave the second man across.”

“I’ll go,” Dex said.

“No. I should be the one.”

The declaration was brave. Dex felt a little of what this trip meant to Howard. Howard never talked much about himself but Dex had learned a few things about him, in the same wordless way he came to understand the kids who filed into his classroom every September: by gesture and posture, by what was said and what wasn’t. Howard took no delight in defying authority. Dex pictured him as the bright, quiet kid who always picks a desk at the back of the room, the one who doesn’t smoke on school grounds or liberate bags of M&M’s from the corner grocery. The one who follows the rules and takes a certain pride in doing so.

Not much like me, Dex thought. A middle-aged man with no possession but himself and too careless even with that. He said, “No, I’ll go.”

Howard seemed to be working up an objection, but Dex made it moot by vaulting out onto the windy space of Oak Street.

He sprinted toward the opposite side. He felt a little giddy, actually, out here on the empty pavement. Once, when he was seventeen and living with his parents in Phoenix, he had gotten drunk at someone’s party and ended up walking home at four in the morning. On an impulse he had stepped into the middle of what in daylight was a busy suburban street, and he had sat down cross-legged on the white line. King of creation. There had been no other pedestrians that night, no traffic, only dry air and a patient, starry sky. He had stayed in that sublime lotus for almost five minutes, until he saw a distant wink of headlights; then he got up, yawned, and sauntered home to bed. It amounted to nothing. But the feeling still lingered in his memory.

He was tempted to sit down in the middle of
this
street. A dumb and reckless notion. It was a familiar impulse, though, the urge to wave some flag of defiance in the face of the universe, and he supposed one day it would get him hurt or killed—probably sooner than later, given the state of things. But at times like this he felt both genuinely alive and somehow closer to Abigail and David, who had perished in the fire fifteen years ago. Maybe they were around one of these dark corners. Maybe, if he tempted fate, fate would deliver him to his lost wife and son.

But he crossed Oak without incident and stopped, a little breathless, in the shadows on the opposite side.

The silence seemed larger here. He paid attention to it, sorting through wind-sounds for the rumble of a motor. There was nothing. He braced himself against a brick wall and leaned into the street. He looked hard east and west and saw only streetlights, traffic signals, and the icy white sidewalks.

He located Howard’s silhouette in the alleyway and waved an all-clear.

Howard jogged toward the meridian of Oak in gawky, birdlike strides. He wore a khaki hunting jacket that came nearly to his knees and a black watch cap too low over his eyes. His duct-taped eyeglasses winked in the artificial light. He looked like a cartoon terrorist, Dex thought, and why the hell didn’t he get a move on? He was a target out there.

Howard had only just crossed the white line when Dex saw headlights probing the corner of Oak and Beacon.

He took a half step out of the alley and waved frantically at Howard, trying to hurry him in. Howard saw him and did exactly the wrong thing: froze in place, confused and frightened.

Dex heard the sound of an approaching motor, probably headed south on Beacon. We are seconds away from being seen, he thought. Shouting was a risk, but unavoidable now. He cupped his hands. “Howard! Get the fuck over here! RUN, YOU DUMB SON OF A BITCH!”

Howard looked left and saw the headlights reflected in window glass. It seemed to untangle his legs. He began to sprint, and Dex admired the speed with which the physicist covered those final yards of blacktop.

But the car, a black patrol car, had turned the corner, and there was no way of knowing what the men inside might have seen.

“Get down,” Dex said. “Down behind the Dumpster. Back against the wall. Draw your knees up.” And he did the same.

The patrol car had turned and was coming their way along Oak; he could tell by the sound of its engine.

It growled a lower note. They’ve seen us, Dex thought. He tried to imagine an escape route. South down this alley and maybe out some fire lane to Beacon or one of the suburban streets: get lost in tree shadows or crouch under a porch . . .

There was a sudden light. Dex watched it sweep the alley. He pictured the patrol car, the driver, the militiaman in the passenger seat with a hand-held spot. He was aware of the sound of Howard’s tortured breathing. “Run,” he whispered. “Run if you have to. You cut left, I’ll cut right.”

But the alley was suddenly dark again. The engine coughed and tires crunched on cold asphalt.

Dex heard the sound fade down Oak.

Howard let out a shuddering breath.

“Must be they only caught a glimpse,” Dex said, “or they’d be down here after us. Christ, that was a near call.” He stood and helped Howard up. “I vote we get the hell back across Oak and head for home while we can. Pardon me, Howard, but this whole thing was a stupid idea.”

Howard pulled away and shook his head. “We didn’t get what we came for. We’re not finished. At least, I’m not. You can go home if you want.”

Dex regarded his friend. “Well, hell,” he said finally. “Look who’s Rambo.”

Clifford Stockton sat at the top of the high hill at the center of Powell Creek Park with his bicycle beside him and the cold night wind plucking his hair.

There had already been flurries of snow this season, and it felt like there might soon be more, although the sky tonight had grown crisply, vividly clear. But the cold didn’t bother him. It was exhilarating. He felt completely alive and completely himself, far from the world of his mother and the soldiers and school.

The town lay at his feet. From this high place it resembled the map he had pinned to his bulletin board back home. It was completely static, a grid of stationary lights, except for the patrol cars performing their slow waltz. The cars moved like a glittering clockwork, pausing a beat at each intersection.

“Go to hell,” Clifford told them. This was a whisper. A delicious heresy. The wind carried it away. But there was nobody around to hear him. Giddy, Clifford stood up and shouted it. “GO TO HELL!”

The patrol cars wheeled on, as implacable as the motion of the stars. Clifford laughed but felt near tears.

It was almost time to go home. He had proved he could do this; all that remained was to prove he could get back safely. He was excited, but the cold air began to seem colder and he thought about his room, his bed, with a first pang of longing.

He picked up his bike. Down the brick path to Cleveland Avenue and west toward home. That should be easy enough.

But something caught his eye.

The hilly part of Powell Creek Park overlooked the business district. Clifford enjoyed an unobstructed view down to the intersection of Oak and Beacon. He saw the twin red taillights of a patrol car as it reached the corner—on schedule.

But the car turned west on Oak . . . and shouldn’t it have gone
east
?

And now the car slowed, and that was strange, too. Its spotlight probed an alleyway behind Beacon Street. Clifford crouched on the grass, watching. He felt suddenly vulnerable, too obvious. He wished he had his scanner; maybe he could listen in.

The spotlight winked out and the patrol car moved on along Oak and turned a corner. It disappeared from Clifford’s view behind the stores on Knight, but he was able to track the glow of its headlights. Down Knight to Promontory, farther from the park. Then east again. Then, mysteriously, back onto Beacon.

Circling,
Clifford thought.

And now slowing, now stopping.

The headlights winked off.

Something was happening, Clifford thought. Something was happening or was about to happen on Beacon Street.

Far off along Commercial Street he saw a second car coming fast, probably summoned by the first. A call must have gone out by radio. All the patrol cars were converging on Beacon.

Which meant the schedule was messed up. . . .

Which meant he wasn’t safe here.

He ran for his bike.

Dex Graham worked the point of the crowbar between the frame and the rear door of Desktop Solutions and leaned on it. The lock came away from the wood with a sound like a gunshot. Howard winced.

The door sprang open. Dex said, “Be my guest.”

Howard pulled a long watchman’s flashlight out of the deeps of his jacket and entered the store.

Dex stayed outside, watching the alley. He calculated that this trip from the Cantwell house to the computer store had taken no more than twenty minutes, though it seemed like much longer. Thank God, the deed was nearly done. Here we are, he thought, two of the least likely break-and-enter artists ever to jimmy a lock in the town of Two Rivers. And the least competent.

Now that the adrenaline rush had faded, he was cold. He rubbed his hands together and warmed them with a breath. Alone here, he was uncomfortably aware of the perilous distance between himself and safety. Until the close call with the patrol car there had been an edge of excitement to this trip; that was gone, replaced by a sour anxiety.

The wind rattled a loose doorway down the alley. Winter at the heels of a wind like that, Dex thought. When he came here five years ago he had been startled by the severity of the northern Michigan winter. He wondered how much of Two Rivers would survive the season and what would be left of it by spring. The question was unanswerable but the possibilities were mainly bleak.

He heard a percussive rattle and whirled to face it, but the culprit was only a dog, a hound nosing a trash barrel overturned by the wind. The dog looked at Dex with an expression of rheumy indifference and shivered from the neck down. I know how you feel, Dex thought.

He looked at his watch, then peered into the dim interior of the store. “Hey, Howard, how you doing in there?”

No answer. But Dex could see the beam of Howard’s flashlight poking around—a little too vigorously, Dex thought. He took a step inside. “Howard?”

Nothing.

“Howard, it’s cold out here! Bag your loot and let’s get going, all right?”

He felt something touch his leg. Overcome by a sudden sense of unreality, Dex looked down. Here was Howard: crouched behind the cash counter with sweat beading on his pale forehead. Howard had grabbed Dex’s ankle and was waving some panicked, indecipherable signal.

Dex guessed this ought to be frightening, but for a long moment it was only confusing. He said out loud, “What the hell?”

And the flashlight beam continued to probe the darkness—but not Howard’s flashlight.

Another presence loomed in this dark arcade of shelves and desks, suddenly visible as Dex’s eyesight adjusted to the dark. He turned to face the rear door just as the beam of light pinned his shadow to the wall. He saw his shadow ride up toward the ceiling, as loose-jointed and comical as a marionette. Then there was a flash and a deafening bang, a pressure and a pain that knocked him off his feet.

He heard Howard shouting something: it might have been
Don’t shoot!
or
God damn!
And he felt his left arm twitch in a useless, distant fashion, and the wet warmth of blood.

And then footsteps.

And then a sudden, second light—the brightest yet.

Clifford decided to ride home by way of Powell Road, which crossed Beacon north and uphill from the business district.

It was a short ride down the park path and out the gate onto Powell. Home from the park was a gravity-assist all the way. The bicycle bearings shrilled into the dark and Clifford felt the wind on his face like a barrage of needles. The big houses near the park blurred past on each side of him, fading behind him like an elegant dream.

He leaned on the hand brakes at the corner of Beacon and came to a stop beside a tall privet hedge.

Curiosity and prudence had begun a pitched battle in the pit of Clifford’s stomach. Curiosity had the advantage. He peered around the hedge, downhill toward the shops south of Oak.

There was not much to see from this distance; only a distant light, a headlight, which winked out when he looked at it: another patrol car.

Would it be dangerous to try to get closer? Well, obviously it would. No doubt about that. He had seen the bodies on that wooden cart outside City Hall last June, and the memory put a jog into his heartbeat. People had been killed for what he was doing right now.

But it was night and he was agile and he could always hide or run . . . and anyway, it wasn’t him they were after.

He wheeled down Beacon almost all the way to Oak, keeping close to the trees and hedges of these big lawns, most of which had grown high and weedy over the summer.