Red Dragon (43 page)

From the trunk of an FBI sedan Janowitz brought a long cardboard box. A shotgun, the stock burned off and barrels twisted by the heat, was wired to the bottom of the box. A smaller box contained a blackened automatic pistol.

“The pistol came out better,” Aynesworth said. “Ballistics may be able to make a match with it. Come on, Janowitz, get to it.”

Aynesworth took three plastic freezer bags from him.

“Front and center, Graham.” For a moment the humor left Aynesworth’s face. This was a hunter’s ritual, like smearing Graham’s forehead with blood.

“That was a real sly show, podna.” Aynesworth put the bags in Graham’s hands.

One bag contained five inches of a charred human femur and the ball of a hip. Another contained a wrist-watch. The third held the teeth.

The plate was black and broken and only half was there, but that half contained the unmistakable pegged lateral incisor.

Graham supposed he should say something. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

His head swam briefly and he relaxed all over.

“. . . museum piece,” Aynesworth was saying. “We have to turn it over to the turkey, don’t we, Jack?”

“Yeah. But there’re some pros in the St. Louis coroner’s office. They’ll come over and make good impressions. We’ll have those.”

Crawford and the others huddled with the coroner beside his car.

Graham was alone with the house. He listened to the wind in the chimneys. He hoped Bloom would come here when he was well. Probably he would.

Graham wanted to know about Dolarhyde. He wanted to know what happened here, what bred the Dragon. But he had had enough for now.

A mockingbird lit on the top of a chimney and whistled.

Graham whistled back.

He was going home.

Graham smiled when he felt the jet’s big push rocket him up and away from St. Louis, turning across the sun’s path south and east at last toward home.

Molly and Willy would be there.

“Let’s don’t jack around about who’s sorry for what. I’ll pick you up in Marathon, kiddo,” she said on the phone.

In time he hoped he would remember the few good moments—the satisfaction of seeing people at work who were deeply committed to their skills. He supposed you could find that anywhere if you knew enough about what you were watching.

It would have been presumptuous to thank Lloyd Bowman and Beverly Katz, so he just told them on the telephone that he was glad to have worked with them again.

One thing bothered him a little: the way he felt when Crawford turned from the telephone in Chicago and said, “It’s Gateway.”

Possibly that was the most intense and savage joy that had ever burst in him. It was unsettling to know that the happiest moment of his life had come then, in that stuffy jury room in the city of Chicago.
When even before he knew, he knew.

He didn’t tell Lloyd Bowman how it felt; he didn’t have to.

“You know, when his theorem rang the cherries, Pythagoras gave one hundred oxen to the Muse,” Bowman said. “Nothing sweeter, is there? Don’t answer—it lasts better if you don’t spend it talking.”

Graham grew more impatient the closer he got to home and to Molly. In Miami he had to go out on the apron to board
Aunt Lula
, the old DC-3 that flew to Marathon.

He liked DC-3’s. He liked everything today.

Aunt Lula
was built when Graham was five years old and her wings were always dirty with a film of oil that blew back from the engines. He had great confidence in her. He ran to her as though she had landed in a jungle clearing to rescue him.

Islamorada’s lights were coming on as the island passed under the wing. Graham could still see white-caps on the Atlantic side. In minutes they were descending to Marathon.

It was like the first time he came to Marathon. He had come aboard
Aunt Lula
that time too, and often afterward he went to the airfield at dusk to watch her coming in, slow and steady, flaps down, fire flickering out her exhausts and all the passengers safe behind their lighted windows.

The takeoffs were good to watch as well, but when the old airplane made her great arc to the north it left him sad and empty and the air was acrid with good-byes. He learned to watch only the landings and hellos.

That was before Molly.

With a final grunt, the airplane swung onto the apron. Graham saw Molly and Willy standing behind the fence, under the floodlights.

Willy was solidly planted in front of her. He’d stay there until Graham joined them. Only then would he wander along, examining whatever interested him. Graham liked him for that.

Molly was the same height as Graham, five feet ten inches. A level kiss in public carries a pleasant jolt, possibly because level kisses usually are exchanged in bed.

Willy offered to carry his suitcase. Graham gave him the suit bag instead.

Riding home to Sugarloaf Key, Molly driving, Graham remembered the things picked out by the headlights, imagined the rest.

When he opened the car door in the yard, he could hear the sea.

Willy went into the house, holding the suit bag on top of his head, the bottom flapping against the backs of his legs.

Graham stood in the yard absently brushing mosquitoes away from his face.

Molly put her hand on his cheek. “What you ought to do is come on in the house before you get eaten up.”

He nodded. His eyes were wet.

She waited a moment longer, tucked her head and peered up at him, wiggling her eyebrows. “Tanqueray martinis, steaks, hugging and stuff. Right this way . . . and the light bill and the water bill and lengthy conversations with my child,” she added out of the side of her mouth.

Graham and Molly wanted very much for it to be the same again between them, to go on as they had before.

When they saw that it was not the same, the unspoken knowledge lived with them like unwanted company in the house. The mutual assurances they tried to exchange in the dark and in the day passed through some refraction that made them miss the mark.

Molly had never looked better to him. From a painful distance, he admired her unconscious grace.

She tried to be good to him, but she had been to Oregon and she had raised the dead.

Willy felt it and he was cool to Graham, maddeningly polite.

A letter came from Crawford. Molly brought it in the mail and did not mention it.

It contained a picture of the Sherman family, printed from movie film. Not everything had burned, Crawford’s note explained. A search of the fields around the house had turned this picture up, along with a few other things the explosion had blown far from the fire.

“These people were probably on his itinerary,” Crawford wrote. “Safe now. Thought you’d like to know.”

Graham showed it to Molly.

“See? That’s why,” he said. “That’s why it was worth it.”

“I know,” she said. “I understand that, really I do.”

The bluefish were running under the moon. Molly packed suppers and they fished and they built fires, and none of it was any good.

Grandpa and Mamamma sent Willy a picture of his pony and he tacked it to the wall in his room.

The fifth day home was the last day before Graham and Molly would go back to work in Marathon. They fished in the surf, walking a quarter-mile around the curving beach to a place where they had luck before.

Graham had decided to talk to both of them together.

The expedition did not begin well. Willy pointedly put aside the rod Graham had rigged for him and brought the new surf-casting rod his grandfather sent home with him.

They fished for three hours in silence. Graham opened his mouth to speak several times, but it didn’t seem right.

He was tired of being disliked.

Graham caught four snappers, using sand fleas for bait. Willy caught nothing. He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his T-shirt stuck to him.

Graham waded into the water, scooped sand in the backwash of a wave, and came up with two sand fleas, their legs waving from their shells.

“How about one of these, partner?” He held out a sand flea to Willy.

“I’ll use the Rapala. It was my father’s, did you know that?”

“No,” Graham said. He glanced at Molly.

She hugged her knees and looked far off at a frigate bird sailing high.

She got up and brushed off the sand. “I’ll go fix some sandwiches,” she said.

When Molly had gone, Graham was tempted to talk to the boy by himself. No. Willy would feel whatever his mother felt. He’d wait and get them both together when she came back. He’d do it this time.

She wasn’t gone long and she came back without the sandwiches, walking swiftly on the packed sand above the surf.

“Jack Crawford’s on the phone. I told him you’d call him back, but he said it’s urgent,” she said, examining a fingernail. “Better hurry.”

Graham blushed. He stuck the butt of his rod in the sand and trotted toward the dunes. It was quicker than going around the beach if you carried nothing to catch in the brush.

He heard a low whirring sound carried on the wind and, wary of a rattler, he scanned the ground as he went into the scrub cedar.

He saw boots beneath the brush, the glint of a lens and a flash of khaki rising.

He looked into the yellow eyes of Francis Dolarhyde and fear raised the hammers of his heart.

Snick of a pistol action working, an automatic coming up and Graham kicked at it, struck it as the muzzle bloomed pale yellow in the sun, and the pistol flew into the brush. Graham on his back, something burning in the left side of his chest, slid headfirst down the dune onto the beach.

Dolarhyde leaped high to land on Graham’s stomach with both feet and he had the knife out now and never looked up at the thin screaming from the water’s edge. He pinned Graham with his knees, raised the knife high and grunted as he brought it down. The blade missed Graham’s eye and crunched deep into his cheek.

Dolarhyde rocked forward and put his weight on the handle of the knife to shove it through Graham’s head.

The rod whistled as Molly swung it hard at Dolarhyde’s face. The big Rapala’s hooks sank solidly in his cheek and the reel screamed, paying out line as she drew back to strike again.

He growled, grabbed at his face as she hit him, and the treble hooks jammed into his hand as well. One hand free, one hand hooked to his face, he tugged the knife out and started after her.

Graham rolled over, got to his knees, then his feet, eyes wild and choking blood he ran, ran from Dolarhyde, ran until he collapsed.

Molly ran for the dunes, Willy ahead of her. Dolarhyde was coming, dragging the rod. It caught on a bush and pulled him howling to a stop before he thought to cut the line.

“Run baby, run baby, run baby! Don’t look back,” she gasped. Her legs were long and she shoved the boy ahead of her, the crashing ever closer in the brush behind them.

They had one hundred yards on him when they left the dunes, seventy yards when they reached the house. Scrambling up the stairs. Clawing in Will’s closet.

To Willy, “Stay here.”

Down again to meet him. Down to the kitchen, not ready, fumbling with the speedloader.

She forgot the stance and she forgot the front sight but she got a good two-handed grip on the pistol and as the door exploded inward she blew a rat hole through his thigh—“Muhner!”—and she shot him in the face as he slid down the door facing and she shot him in the face as he sat on the floor and she ran to him and shot him twice in the face as he sprawled against the wall, scalp down to his chin and his hair on fire.

 

 

 

Willy tore up a sheet and went to look for Will. His legs were shaking and he fell several times crossing the yard.

The sheriff’s deputies and ambulances came before Molly ever thought to call them. She was taking a shower when they came in the house behind their pistols. She was scrubbing hard at the flecks of blood and bone on her face and hair and she couldn’t answer when a deputy tried to talk to her through the shower curtain.

One of the deputies finally picked up the dangling telephone receiver and talked to Crawford in Washington, who had heard the shots and summoned them.

“I don’t know, they’re bringing him in now,” the deputy said. He looked out the window as the litter passed. “It don’t look good to me,” he said.

On the wall at the foot of the bed there was a clock with numbers large enough to read through the drugs and the pain.

When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was—an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass.

That’s what it was there for.

It said four o’clock. He had no idea which four o’clock and he didn’t care, as long as the hands were moving. He drifted away.

The clock said eight when he opened his eye again.

Someone was to the side of him. Cautiously he turned his eye. It was Molly, looking out the window. She was thin. He tried to speak, but a great ache filled the left side of his head when he moved his jaw. His head and his chest did not throb together. It was more of a syncopation. He made a noise as she left the room.

The window was light when they pulled and tugged at him and did things that made the cords in his neck stand out.

Yellow light when he saw Crawford’s face over him.

Graham managed to wink. When Crawford grinned, Graham could see a piece of spinach between his teeth.

Odd. Crawford eschewed most vegetables.

Graham made writing motions on the sheet beneath his hand.