by Stephen King
"I will. I always am."
He started to pull away from her. She pulled him back. Her grip on his forearms was strong.
"Yes, but this isn't like any other case you've ever worked. We both know that now. If you can get him, get him. If you can't . . . if you run into something you can't handle . . . back off. Back off and come home to me, do you understand?"
"I hear you."
"Don't say you hear me, say you will."
"I will." Again he thought of the day they'd made their vows.
"I hope you mean that." Still with that piercing gaze, so full of love and anxiety. The one that said I've cast my lot with you, please don't ever let me regret it. "I need to tell you something, and it's important. Are you listening?"
"Yes."
"You're a good man, Ralph. A good man who made a bad mistake. You're not the first to do that, and you won't be the last. You have to live with it, and I'll help you. Make it better if you can, but please don't make it worse. Please."
Holly was coming rather ostentatiously downstairs, making sure they heard her approach. Ralph stood where he was a moment longer, looking down into his wife's wide eyes--as beautiful now as they had been those years ago. Then he kissed her and stood back. She gave his hands a squeeze, a good hard one, and let him go.
6
Ralph and Holly drove to the airport in Ralph's car. Holly sat with her shoulder-bag in her lap, back straight, knees primly together. "Does your wife have a firearm?" she asked.
"Yes. And she's been to the department qualifying range. Wives and daughters are allowed to do that here. What about you, Holly?"
"Of course not. I flew down here, and it wasn't on a charter."
"I'm sure we could get you something. We're going to Texas, after all, not New York."
She shook her head. "I haven't fired a gun since Bill was alive. That was on the last case we worked together. And I didn't hit what I was aiming at."
He didn't speak again until they had merged with the heavy flow of turnpike traffic headed for the airport and Cap City. Once that dangerous feat was accomplished, he said, "Those samples from the barn are at the State Police forensics lab. What do you think they're going to find when they finally get around to running them through all their fancy equipment? Any ideas?"
"Based on what showed up on the chair and the carpet, I'd guess it will be mostly water, but with a high pH. I'd guess there would be traces of a mucus-like fluid of the type produced by the bulbourethral glands, also known as Cowper's glands, named after the anatomist William Cowper who--"
"So you do think it's semen."
"More like pre-ejaculate." A faint tinge of color had come into her cheeks.
"You know your stuff."
"I took a course in forensic pathology after Bill died. I took several courses, in fact. Taking courses . . . it passed the time."
"There was semen on the backs of Frank Peterson's thighs. Quite a lot of it, but not an abnormal amount. The DNA matched Terry Maitland's."
"The residue from the barn and the residue in your house isn't semen, and not pre-ejaculate, no matter how similar. When the lab tests the stuff from Canning Township, I think they will find unknown components and dismiss them as contamination. They'll just be glad they don't have to use the samples in court. They won't consider the idea that they're dealing with a completely unknown substance: the stuff he exudes--or sluffs off--when he changes. As for the semen found on the Peterson boy . . . I'm sure the outsider left semen when he killed the Howard girls, too. Either on their clothes or on their bodies. Just another calling card, like the lock of hair in Mr. Maitland's bathroom and all the fingerprints you found."
"Don't forget the eye-wits."
"Yes," she agreed. "This creature likes witnesses. Why wouldn't he, if he can wear another man's face?"
Ralph followed the signs to the charter company Howard Gold used. "So you don't think these were actually sex crimes? They were just arranged to look that way?"
"I wouldn't make that assumption, but . . ." She turned to him. "Sperm on the back of the boy's legs, but none . . . you know . . . in him?"
"No. He was penetrated--raped--with a branch."
"Oough." Holly grimaced. "I doubt if the postmortem on the girls revealed any semen inside them, either. I think there might be a sexual element to his killings, but he might be incapable of actual intercourse."
"That's the case with a good many normal serial killers." He laughed at this--as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp--but didn't take it back, because the only substitute he could think of was human serial killers.
"If he eats sadness, he also must eat the pain of his victims as they're dying." The flush in her cheeks was gone, leaving her pale. "It's probably extremely rich, like gourmet food or some fine old Scotch. And yes, that could excite him sexually. I don't like to think of these things, but I believe in knowing your enemy. We . . . I think you should turn left there, Detective Anderson." She pointed.
"Ralph."
"Yes. Turn left, Ralph. That's the road that goes to Regal Air."
7
Howie and Alec were already there, and Howie was smiling. "Takeoff's been pushed back a bit," he said. "Sablo's on his way."
"How did he manage that?" Ralph asked.
"He didn't. I did. Well, I managed half of it. Judge Martinez is in the hospital with a perforated ulcer, and that was God's doing. Or maybe just too much hot sauce. I'm a fan of Texas Pete myself, but the way that guy poured it on used to give me the shivers. As for the other case Lieutenant Sablo was supposed to testify in, the ADA owed me a favor."
"Should I ask why?" Ralph asked.
"No," Howie said, now smiling widely enough to show his back teeth.
With time to kill, the four of them sat in the small waiting room--nothing so grand as a departure lounge--and watched the planes take off and land. Howie said, "When I got home last night, I went on the Internet and read up on doppelgangers. Because that's what this outsider is, wouldn't you say?"
Holly shrugged. "It's as good a word as any."
"The most famous fictional one is in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. 'William Wilson,' it's called."
"Jeannie knew about that one," Ralph said. "We talked about it."
"But there have been plenty in real life. Hundreds, it seems like. Including one on the Lusitania. There was a passenger named Rachel Withers, in first class, and several people saw another woman who looked just like her, right down to the streak of white in her hair, during the voyage. Some said the double was traveling in steerage. Some said she was part of the staff. Miss Withers and a gentleman friend went looking for her, and supposedly spotted her only seconds before a torpedo from a German U-boat hit on the starboard side. Miss Withers died, but her gentleman friend survived. He called her doppelganger 'a harbinger of doom.' The French writer, Guy de Maupassant, met his doppelganger one day while walking on a street in Paris--same height, same hair, same eyes, same mustache, same accent."
"Well, the French," Alec said, shrugging. "What do you expect? De Maupassant probably bought him a glass of wine."
"The most famous case happened in 1845, at a girls' school in Latvia. The teacher was writing on the blackboard when her exact double walked into the room, stood beside the teacher, and mimicked her every move, only without the chalk. Then she walked out. Nineteen students saw it happen. Isn't that amazing?"
No one replied. Ralph was thinking of an infested cantaloupe, and disappearing footprints, and something Holly's dead friend had said: No end to the universe. He supposed it was a concept some people might find uplifting, even beautiful. Ralph, a just-the-facts man for his entire working life, found it terrifying.
"Well, I think it's amazing," Howie said, a bit sulkily.
Alec said, "Tell me something, Holly. If this guy absorbs his victims' thoughts and memories when he takes their faces--through some sort of mystic blood transfusion, I guess--how come he didn't know where to find the nearest walk-in clinic? And then there'
s Willow Rainwater, the cab driver. Maitland knew her from the kids' basketball program at the Y, but the man she drove to Dubrow acted like he'd never met her. Didn't call her Willow, or Ms. Rainwater. Called her ma'am."
"I don't know," Holly said, rather crossly. "All I do know I picked up on the fly, and I mean that literally, because I was on airplanes when I did my reading. The only thing I can do is make guesses, and I'm tired of that."
"Maybe it's like speed-reading," Ralph said. "Speed readers are very proud of being able to go through long books cover to cover in a single sitting, but what they mostly pick up is the general gist. If you question them on the details, they usually come up blank." He paused. "At least that's what my wife says. She's in a book club, and there's this one lady who's a little boasty about her reading skills. Drives Jeannie crazy."
They watched as the ground crew fueled the King Air and the two pilots did their pre-flight walk-around. Holly dragged out her iPad and began to read (Ralph thought she was moving along pretty speedily herself). At quarter to ten, a Subaru Forester pulled into the tiny Regal parking lot and Yune Sablo got out, shrugging a camo knapsack over one shoulder as he talked on his cell phone. He ended his call as he came in.
"Amigos! Como estan?"
"Fine," Ralph said, standing. "Let's get this show on the road."
"That was Claude Bolton I was talking to. He's going to meet us at the Plainville airport. It's about sixty miles from Marysville, where he lives."
Alec raised his eyebrows. "Why would he do that?"
"He's worried. Says he didn't sleep much last night, was up and down half a dozen times, felt like someone was watching the house. He said it reminded him of days in prison when everyone knew something was going to go down, but no one knew exactly what, only that it was going to be bad. Said his mother started to get the willies, too. He asked me exactly what was going on, and I told him we'd fill him in when we got there."
Ralph turned to Holly. "If this outsider exists, and if he was close to Bolton, could Bolton feel his presence?"
Instead of protesting again about being asked to guess, she answered in a voice that was soft but very firm. "I'm sure of it."
BIENVENIDOS A TEJAS
July 26th
1
Jack Hoskins crossed into Texas around 2 AM on July 26th, and checked into a fleapit called the Indian Motel just as the day's first light was showing in the east. He paid the sleepy-eyed clerk for a week, using his MasterCard--the only one that wasn't maxed out--and asked for a room at the far end of the ramshackle building.
The room smelled of used booze and old cigarette smoke. The coverlet was threadbare, and the case of the pillow on the swaybacked bed was yellow with age, sweat, or both. He sat down in the room's only chair and ran quickly and without much interest through the text messages and voicemails on his phone (these latter had ceased around 4 AM, when the mailbox reached its capacity). All from the station, many from Chief Geller himself. There had been a double murder on the West Side. With both Ralph Anderson and Betsy Riggins out of service, he was the only detective on duty, where was he, he was needed on the scene immediately, blah-blah-blah.
He lay down on the bed, first on his back, but that hurt the sunburn too much. He turned onto his side, the springs squalling a protest under his considerable weight. I'll weigh less if the cancer takes hold, he thought. Ma was nothing but a skeleton wrapped in skin by the end. A skeleton that screamed.
"Not going to happen," he told the empty room. "I just need some goddam sleep. This is going to work out."
Four hours would be enough. Five, if he was lucky. But his brain wouldn't turn off; it was like an engine racing in neutral. Cody, the little dope-pushing rat at the Hi station, had had the little white pills, all right, and he'd also had a good supply of coke, which he claimed was almost pure. From the way Jack felt now, lying on this crappy excuse for a bed (he didn't even consider getting into it, God knew what might be crawling around on the sheets), the claim had been true. A few short snorts were all he'd had, in the hours after midnight when it seemed like the drive would never end, and now he felt like he might never sleep again--felt, in fact, as if he could shingle a roof and then run five miles. Yet eventually sleep did come, although it was thin and haunted by dreams of his mother.
When he woke up it was after noon, and the room was stinking hot in spite of the poor excuse for an air conditioner. He went into the bathroom, peed, and tried to look at the nape of his throbbing neck. He couldn't, and maybe that was for the best. He went back into the room and sat on the bed to put on his shoes, but he could only find one of them. He groped for the other, and it was pushed into his hand.
"Jack."
He froze, his arms pebbling with gooseflesh and the short hairs on the back of his neck lifting. The man who had been in his shower back in Flint City was now under his bed, just like the monsters he had feared as a little boy.
"Listen to me, Jack. I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do."
When the voice finally ceased giving him instructions, Jack realized the pain in his neck (sort of funny, that's what he'd always called the old ball and chain) was gone. Well . . . almost. And what he was supposed to do seemed straightforward, if kind of drastic. Which was all right, because he was pretty sure he could get away with it, and stopping Anderson's clock would be an absolute pleasure. Anderson was the chief meddler, after all; old Mr. No Opinion had brought this on himself. It was too bad about the others, but they weren't on Jack. It was Anderson who had dragged them along.
"Tough titty said the kitty," he murmured.
Once his shoes were on, Jack got down on his knees and looked beneath the bed. There was plenty of dust under there, and some of it looked disturbed, but there was nothing else. Which was good. Which was a relief. That his visitor had been there, Jack had no doubt, and he had no doubt about what had been tattooed on the fingers that had pushed the shoe into his hand: CANT.
With the sunburn pain down to a low mutter and his head relatively clear, he thought he could eat something. Steak and eggs, maybe. He had a piece of work ahead of him, and he had to keep his energy up. Man did not live by blow and pep-pills alone. Without food, he might faint in the hot sun, and then he would burn.
Speaking of sun, it hit him like a punch in the face when he went out, and his neck gave a warning throb. He realized with dismay that he was out of sunblock and had forgotten his aloe cream. It was possible they sold something like that in the cafe attached to the motel, along with the rest of the rickrack they always kept by the cash register in places like this: tee-shirts and ball caps and country CDs and Navajo souvenirs made in Cambodia. They had to sell a few of the necessities along with that crap, because the nearest town was--
He came to a dead halt, one hand reaching for the cafe's door, peering through the dusty glass. They were in there. Anderson and his merry band of assholes, including the skinny woman with the gray bangs. There was also an old bag in a wheelchair and a muscular man with short black hair and a goatee. The old bag started laughing about something, then she started coughing. Jack could hear it even outside, like a damn backhoe in low gear. The man with the goatee whacked her on the back a few times, and then they were all laughing.
You'll be laughing on the other side of your damn faces when I get done with you, Jack thought, but actually it was good that they were laughing. Otherwise they might have spotted him.
He turned away, trying to understand what he had seen. Not the bunch of them hee-hawing, he didn't care about that, but when Goatee Man reached to thump Wheelchair Woman on the back, Jack had seen tats on his fingers. The glass was dusty and the blue ink was faded, but he knew what they said: CANT. How the man had gotten from under his bed and into the diner so fast was a mystery that Jack Hoskins didn't care to contemplate. He had a job to do, that was enough, and getting rid of the cancer that was growing in his skin was only half of it. Getting rid of Ralph Anderson was the other half, and it would be a pleasure.
&
nbsp; Old Mr. No Opinion.
2
Plainville Airfield sat in scrubland on the outskirts of the tired little city it served. There was a single runway, which Ralph thought horribly short. The pilot applied full braking as soon as the wheels touched down, and unsecured objects went flying. They came to a stop on a yellow line at the end of the narrow strip of tar, no more than thirty feet from a gully filled with weeds, stagnant water, and Shiner cans.
"Welcome to nowhere in particular," Alec remarked as the King Air lumbered toward a prefab terminal building that looked as if it might blow away in the next high wind. There was a road-dusty Dodge van waiting for them. Ralph recognized it as the wheelchair-accessible Companion model even before he saw the handicap plate. Claude Bolton, tall and muscular in faded jeans, blue work shirt, battered cowboy boots, and a Texas Rangers gimme cap, stood beside it.
Ralph was first off the plane, and he extended a hand. After a second of hesitation, Claude shook it. Ralph found it impossible not to look at the faded letters on the man's fingers: CANT.
"Thank you for making this easy," Ralph said. "You didn't have to, and I appreciate it." He introduced the others.
Holly shook his hand last, and said, "Those tattoos on your fingers . . . are they about drinking?"
Right, Ralph thought. That's one piece of the puzzle I forgot to take out of the box.
"Yes'm, that's right." Bolton spoke like someone teaching a well-learned and well-loved lesson. "The big paradox is what they call it in AA meetings down here. I first heard about it in prison. You must drink, but you can't drink."
"I feel that way about cigarettes," Holly said.
Bolton grinned, and Ralph thought how odd it was that the least socially adept person in their little party was the one who had put Bolton at ease. Not that Bolton had seemed really worried; more on watch. "Yes ma'am, cigarettes is a hard one. How you doing with it?"
