Sleeping Policemen (27 page)

Waiting, Nick studied the rack of stroke books behind the counter, copies of
Juggs
and
Hustler
and half a dozen others sealed in opaque plastic. A curtain twitched aside in his mind, a glimpse of himself wrenching Sue's arms toward her shoulder blades as he drove himself into her from behind. What had Pomeroy said?
You're gonna have to have balls the size of cantaloupes to do what you're gonna have to do. I just can't believe you got em
—

Nick hoped he wouldn't have to find out, hoped he could make the call and go collapse in the cruiser while he waited for the local cops to come collect him. But he had a feeling that Pomeroy was wrong: that if it came to a harder place than this, the new Nick—the Nick that felt the pull of the tape like a new-born star, the Nick behind the bondage mask—would rise to the challenge. That he was capable of anything—anything—if it could buy him absolution, or maybe only silence, the fine and private silence of the grave.

If there was time—

Nick glanced at the old woman ahead of him, digging arthritically through a purse the size of a Thanksgiving turkey.

Choking back that rising sense of panic, time fleeing into the maw of the past, he cleared his throat, crowded her a little, trying to hurry her up. Finally, the old woman surrendered a handful of change and turned away, cradling the coffee against her fallen breasts.

Nick dumped his cash on the counter. He glanced at the cashier, a thin guy, mid-twenties, his face pocked with a rash of acne scars the same shade as his blazing Gas 'N' Go smock.

“I need change.” He took a deep breath, his voice calmer than he felt.

The cashier punched a button, scooped up a buck, dumped four quarters on the counter.

“No—I—” Nick cleared his throat. “For the ten. In quarters.”

“Can't do it, man. I'm short on quarters.”

“Please, you don't understand, I need—I need—” He felt himself coming apart, begging.

As in a dream, he saw himself drag a pistol out of his jacket, one of Pomeroy's old-timey six-shooters, saw himself level it at the guy behind the counter—

He blinked down at his hands, palsied atop a laminated notice taped to the Formica: a pack of Marlboros in a black circle with a line drawn through it. WE I.D.!

He swallowed, looked up. The clerk had taken a step back.

“You okay, man?”

“I gotta have change,” Nick whispered.

“Try the machine. By the car wash.”

The cashier lifted his head, making eye contact with someone behind Nick, a dismissal. Nick scooped the quarters into one hand, snatched the bills off the counter with the other, and turned away, every cell in his body singing with resentment, the precious seconds burning away. He felt the impact—

“Careful, friend—”

—before he saw the man he had run into. He staggered, reeling headlong into a display of motor oil posed by a life-sized cardboard cutout of some NASCAR hero. They went over together, him and the cardboard statue of the guy in the Pennzoil crashsuit and four or five cases of medium-grade 10W40. Nick's hand shot out to break his fall. The quarters bounced away, lost in the clatter of motor oil raining to the floor, twenty or thirty plastic jugs, but it seemed like more, a hundred, a hundred and forty, a thousand. He landed with his knee square on a bottle of Pennzoil. He didn't know which was worse: the pain which shot from his kneecap like one of those county-fair strength tests, the sledgehammer firing the pin straight up his spinal cord and setting all the bells ringing in his brain; or the sickly farting sound as the no-drip spout blew open, jet-propelling a gout of golden sludge across the slick tile.

“Steady there, cowboy, you all right?”

Nick looked up, everything blurry with pain except for two meaty hands right in his face, one clutching a twelve of Milwaukee's Best—

—
the Beast Tucker used to call it
—

—the other extended to give him a hand up. And then his head cleared, a shape resolved itself behind the hands. The fat guy: thick glasses, a beard, a massive gut jutting through his open leather jacket like the prow of an ocean liner, distorting the silver-screened Harley on his black T-shirt.
On the seventh day
, the T-shirt announced,
God bought a hog
.

Nick felt himself pass through some kind of internal border checkpoint, crossing over from the province of low-wattage hysteria into the nation of full-out panic, passport stamped and dated, no return visa, and enjoy your trip. He could see it happening, but there was nothing he could do about it. Time leapt forward—

—
click click click
—

—seconds whipping past like a loose end of film in a projector reel. Too fast, too fast.

Nick scuttled away from the out-stretched hand like a crab, knowing he ought to grab hold of it and let the guy haul him to his feet, knowing he should apologize and pay for the spilled oil, but for Christ's sake he couldn't do it, he couldn't spare the
time
—

He came halfway to his feet, yanking himself up with one hand on a rack of newspapers. The knee screamed, his leg tingling with numbness. He planted his other foot in the puddle of spilled oil, and started for the door. The world blurred as he went down again. A quart of 10W40 skidded across the tile; it fetched up against a freezer full of Eskimo Pies with a sigh, pent-up oil bubbling to the floor.

“Hey!” the cashier exclaimed as Nick clambered to his feet yet again, leaving tracks across the face of the tumbled NASCAR driver. “You gonna pay for—”

But it was too late.

Nick was outside, the door swinging closed behind him. The December air straightened him, pausing time for a heartbeat, maybe two. And then it all collapsed upon him once again, time blurring past, Finney, Sue, everything. Limping, he sprinted across the lot toward the car wash and the automatic change machine.

The bill changer didn't like the taste of the ten. It spit out four quarters for the one willingly enough, but when he fed it the second bill, the machine drew it halfway in, decided it didn't like the flavor and shot it right back at him.

“Shit!” he cried. “Shit, shit,
shit!
”

Nick struck the machine with the flat of his hand. He could feel himself edging out of the Kingdom of Panic, into some place worse—

—
madness
—

—some place he dared not name, for fear that naming it might invoke it. He could hear it, though, a siren song just the other side of the border.

He forced himself to slow down, using a trick his mom had taught him, a little nonsense rhyme—

—
the grand old Duke of York
—

—out of Mother Goose he could use whenever he was upset or afraid. He sang it under his breath, barely moving his lips as he coaxed the wrinkles out of the ten with his thumb and forefinger. The scrap of doggerel recalled an image of his mother, there in his bedroom under the eaves, the book of nursery rhymes open across her lap, light coppering her hair.

He fed the ten into the changer once again. This time the machine swallowed it down, vomiting a cascade of silver in exchange. Nick felt the pressure in his breast ease a little, the siren song of madness retreat to a high-pitched keen at the far edge of consciousness. Abruptly, absurdly, he felt better, as though he had plugged a cartwheel into a Vegas slot and scored jackpot bars straight across the board, the money ringing into the change tray more than a mere ten bucks in quarters, the score of a lifetime, the fortune, at long last, he had always dreamed would be his.

The good feeling didn't last. It took him five minutes to hunt down the area code for D.C. in the tattered white pages dangling below the phone on a stainless steel cord. It took him another two to figure out how to dial long-distance directory assistance—

—1-202-555-1212—

—slotting in the quarters one two three, and stabbing blindly at the buttons with a trembling index finger.

Precious seconds ticked away.

“What city?”

“Washington.”

“What listing?”

“Senator Phineas Durant.” He drummed his fingers against the phone. “His office listing,” he added, glancing back toward the store. The fat guy with the beer was climbing into an ancient pickup, fifties vintage. Nick watched as he fumbled with something in the seat beside him, then tilted a can of beer to his lips.

Something clicked in the telephone. A whir. A computer voice began to reel off the number. Nick squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to keep the digits in order. But already they were slipping out of his grasp, intangible as time itself. He'd have to call again. Anguished tears welled up in his eyes. The computerized voice at the other end said:

“The number can be automatically connected for a charge of forty-five cents. Press one at the tone.”

Yes.

Nick plugged two more quarters in the slot. He pushed one. Another computer voice spoke up: “Please insert two dollars and ninety cents for the first three minutes.”

Cursing, Nick dug in his pocket and slotted twelve more quarters into the slot. The line hummed. He glanced at the Rolex—

—
3:24
—

—and turned to study the cruiser. It looked like the last survivor of a demolition derby, mud-splashed and banged up, with broken branches lodged in the grill and a bullet-hole in the windshield. From where he stood, one shoulder socked into the privacy hood, Nick could see the driver's side of the car, the empty hole where he had shot out the side window, the battered quarterpanels. He couldn't see the other side—the side that had fetched up against the boulder—but he could imagine it: smashed up and peeling paint along its entire length, shiny steel glinting through. That and the interior, the blood-splashed interior with two guns lying in plain sight on the floorboard.

Abruptly, he thought of Pomeroy, handcuffed to a tree not half a mile away. Screaming.

Stupid, he thought. Stupid to come here.

He saw Sue's pinky tumble to the desk.

How long before a cop happened by? He should be on the road, he should never have stopped—

He closed his eyes, invoked that talisman.

The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men
—

The line was ringing. A warm voice, female, rich with the kind of southern accent that exudes mint juleps and long lazy afternoons on the verandah. Finney's oiled accent.

“Senator Durant's office. How may I direct your call?”

Nick took a deep breath, abruptly uncertain how to proceed. He'd never gotten this far in his thinking, had never gotten any farther than digging up the number, making the call—

“Hello?”

“My name is Nick Laymon,” he said, the words rising unbidden to his lips. “I know Senator Durant's son, Finney. We're good friends, we go to school together in Ransom, North Carolina. Ransom College. I—I need to speak to the Senator, okay? I need to speak to him, please.”

The woman at the other end of the line was unfazed. “The Senator is in a meeting, Mr. Laymon. If you'd like to leave a number—”

“Ma'am?” he said. “Ma'am, you need to listen to me, okay? I have to talk to the Senator, okay? Even if he's meeting with—with the President or something—it doesn't matter. You have to get him.”

“Sir, I can let the Senator know—”

“I can't wait, okay?”

The temperature of the voice dropped twenty degrees, unpleasant without quite crossing the line into rudeness. “If you'll hold please, sir.”

“No, please—”

But she was gone. Music, something classical with lots of strings, a harpsichord. Bach maybe. He didn't know.

Nick swallowed.

He glanced at the watch again—3:26—and felt a renewed wave of panic crash over him. He glanced toward the store. The cashier looked up simultaneously, and for a moment their gazes locked. Nick saw himself stagger into the fat man and go down, the oil spreading in a pool over the tile, and once again the stupidity of the whole chain of events washed over him. Likely enough, the cashier had called the cops—

Someone broke into the Bach. The computer voice again, dunning him for another twelve quarters. Three more minutes.

He plugged them into the slot one by one, the weight in his jacket noticeably diminished, and then there was another voice. The woman.

“If you could just tell me what your call is regarding, sir.”

“Do you like your job, ma'am?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you like working for the Senator?”

“I don't know what you're talking about—”

“Because if you do, you want to get him on the phone, okay?”

“Mr. Laymon, I don't think there's any need for threats, now do you? I hardly see—”

“Goddamnit, get me the Senator!”

The line went dead. Nick bashed the receiver against the phone's metal casing, once, twice, a third time. He heard an ominous crack, plastic giving. He fumbled for more change and plunged half a dozen quarters into the slot. Two more tumbled away. One spun to a stop on the pavement maybe a foot away. The other dropped into a sewer grating.

Gone.

Punching out directory assistance with a palsied finger, he requested the number once again. This time, he didn't even bother to try to memorize the number, just had the machine put it through. The world seemed to be growing hazy beyond the shell of the privacy hood. He had that sense of border crossing once again, that siren song growing louder, and now he let his conscious mind put a name to it: madness.

Somone picked up the phone.

The woman.

“Now, listen,” he said, “you have to—you have to let me speak to him—”

“Mr. Laymon?”

“Please—”

“If you could just calm down, sir, I'm sure—”

“—if you don't let me talk to him, Finney—Finney is going to die—”

Silence.

Nick sagged, hating himself for the lie. Finney was dead, he knew. Had to be. Yet still doubt wormed at him. Had he seen Finney's hand close around that bullet? And if so, if Finney had been alive when Evans slammed the trunk, then wasn't that worse? For Nick had failed to help him, a further betrayal—