Black House js-2

by Stephen King

  Cops, meanwhile, are clustering around the dispatch desk: Lund, Tcheda, Stevens. What Dale sees when he looks at them is nothing but big eyes and pale, bewildered faces. And the ones on patrol? The ones currently off duty? No better. With the possible exception of Bobby Dulac, no better. He feels despair as well as horror. Oh, this is a nightmare. A truck with no brakes rolling downhill toward a crowded school playground.

  He pulls the earphones off, tearing a small cut by his ear, not feeling it. “Where’d it come from?” he asks Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has hung up the telephone and is just sitting there, stunned. Dale grabs his shoulder and gives it a shake. “Where’d it come from?”

  “The 7-Eleven,” the Mad Hungarian replies, and Dale hears Danny Tcheda grunt. Not too far from where the Marshall boy’s bike disappeared, in other words. “I just spoke with Mr. Rajan Patel, the day clerk. He says the callback number belongs to the pay phone, just outside.”

  “Did he see who made the call?”

  “No. He was out back, taking a beer delivery.”

  “You positive Patel himself didn’t—”

  “Yeah. He’s got an Indian accent. Heavy. The guy on 911 . . . Dale, you heard him. He sounded like anybody.”

  “What’s going on?” Pam Stevens asks. She has a good idea, though; they all do. It’s just a question of details. “What’s happened?”

  Because it’s the quickest way to get them up to speed, Dale replays the call, this time on speaker.

  In the stunned silence that follows, Dale says: “I’m going out to Ed’s Eats. Tom, you’re coming with me.”

  “Yessir!” Tom Lund says. He looks almost ill with excitement.

  “Four more cruisers to follow me.” Most of Dale’s mind is frozen; this procedural stuff skates giddily on top of the ice. I’m okay at procedure and organization, he thinks. It’s just catching the goddamn psycho murderer that’s giving me a little trouble. “All pairs. Danny, you and Pam in the first. Leave five minutes after Tom and I do. Five minutes by the clock, and no lights or siren. We’re going to keep this quiet just as long as we can.”

  Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens look at each other, nod, then look back at Dale. Dale is looking at Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski. He ticks off three more pairs, ending with Dit Jesperson and Bobby Dulac. Bobby is the only one he really wants out there; the others are just insurance and—God grant it not be necessary—crowd control. All of them are to come at five-minute intervals.

  “Let me go out, too,” Arnie Hrabowski pleads. “Come on, boss, what do you say?”

  Dale opens his mouth to say he wants Arnie right where he is, but then he sees the hopeful look in those watery brown eyes. Even in his own deep distress, Dale can’t help responding to that, at least a little. For Arnie, police life is too often standing on the sidewalk while the parade goes by.

  Some parade, he thinks.

  “I tell you what, Arn,” he says. “When you finish all your other calls, buzz Debbi. If you can get her in here, you can come out to Ed’s.”

  Arnold nods excitedly, and Dale almost smiles. The Mad Hungarian will have Debbi in here by nine-thirty, he guesses, even if he has to drag her by the hair like Alley Oop. “Who do I pair with, Dale?”

  “Come by yourself,” Dale says. “In the DARE car, why don’t you? But, Arnie, if you leave this desk without relief waiting to drop into the chair the second you leave it, you’ll be looking for a new job come tomorrow.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Hrabowski says, and, Hungarian or not, in his excitement he sounds positively Suh-vee-dish. Nor is that surprising, since Centralia, where he grew up, was once known as Swede Town.

  “Come on, Tom,” Dale says. “We’ll grab the evidence kit on our—”

  “Uh . . . boss?”

  “What, Arnie?” Meaning, of course, What now?

  “Should I call those State Police guys, Brown and Black?”

  Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens snicker. Tom smiles. Dale doesn’t do either. His heart, already in the cellar, now goes even lower. Subbasement, ladies and gentlemen—false hopes on your left, lost causes on your right. Last stop, everybody out.

  Perry Brown and Jeff Black. He had forgotten them, how funny. Brown and Black, who would now almost certainly take his case away from him.

  “They’re still out at the Paradise Motel,” the Mad Hungarian goes on, “although I think the FBI guy went back to Milwaukee.”

  “I—”

  “And County,” the Hungarian plows relentlessly along. “Don’t forget them. You want me to call the M.E. first, or the evidence wagon?” The evidence wagon is a blue Ford Econoline van, packed with everything from quick-drying plaster for taking tire impressions to a rolling video studio. Stuff the French Landing P.D. will never have access to.

  Dale stands where he is, head lowered, looking dismally at the floor. They are going to take the case away from him. With every word Hrabowski says, that is clearer. And suddenly he wants it for his own. In spite of how he hates it and how it scares him, he wants it with all his heart. The Fisherman is a monster, but he’s not a county monster, a state monster, or a Federal Bureau of Investigation monster. The Fisherman is a French Landing monster, Dale Gilbertson’s monster, and he wants to keep the case for reasons that have nothing to do with personal prestige or even the practical matter of holding on to his job. He wants him because the Fisherman is an offense against everything Dale wants and needs and believes in. Those are things you can’t say out loud without sounding corny and stupid, but they are true for all that. He feels a sudden, foolish anger at Jack. If Jack had come on board sooner, maybe—

  And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. He has to notify County, if only to get the medical examiner out at the scene, and he has to notify the State Police, in the persons of Detectives Brown and Black, as well. But not until he has a look at what’s out there, in the field beyond Goltz’s. At what the Fisherman has left. By God, not until then.

  And, perhaps, has one final swing at the bastard.

  “Get our guys rolling at five-minute intervals,” he said, “just as I told you. Then get Debbi in the dispatch chair. Have her call State and County.” Arnold Hrabowski’s puzzled face makes Dale feels like screaming, but somehow he retains his patience. “I want some lead time.”

  “Oh,” Arnie says, and then, when he actually does get it: “Oh!”

  “And don’t tell anyone other than our guys about the call or our response. Anyone. You’d likely start a panic. Do you understand?”

  “Absolutely, boss,” says the Hungarian.

  Dale glances at the clock: 8:26 A.M. “Come on, Tom,” he says. “Let’s get moving. Tempus fugit.”

  The Mad Hungarian has never been more efficient, and things fall into place like a dream. Even Debbi Anderson is a good sport about the desk. And yet through it all, the voice on the phone stays with him. Hoarse, raspy, with just a tinge of accent—the kind anyone living in this part of the world might pick up. Nothing unusual about that. Yet it haunts him. Not that the guy called him an asswipe—he’s been called much worse by your ordinary Saturday night drunks—but some of the other stuff. There are whips in hell and chains in shayol. My name is legion. Stuff like that. And abbalah. What was an abbalah? Arnold Hrabowski doesn’t know. He only knows that the very sound of it in his head makes him feel bad and scared. It’s like a word in a secret book, the kind you might use to conjure up a demon.

  When he gets the willies, there’s only one person who can take them away, and that’s his wife. He knows Dale told him not to tell anybody about what was going down, and he understands the reasons, but surely the chief didn’t mean Paula. They have been married twenty years, and Paula isn’t like another person at all. She’s like the rest of him.

  So (more in order to dispel his bad case of the willies than to gossip; let’s at least give Arnold that much) the Mad Hungarian makes the terrible mistake of trusting his wife’s discretion. He calls Paula and tells her that he spoke to the Fisherman no
t half an hour ago. Yes, really, the Fisherman! He tells her about the body that is supposedly waiting for Dale and Tom Lund out at Ed’s Eats. She asks him if he’s all right. Her voice is trembling with awe and excitement, and the Mad Hungarian finds this quite satisfying, since he’s feeling awed and excited himself. They talk a little more, and when Arnold hangs up, he feels better. The terror of that rough, strangely knowing voice on the phone has receded a little.

  Paula Hrabowski is discretion itself, the very soul of discretion. She tells only her two best friends about the call Arnie got from the Fisherman and the body at Ed’s Eats, and swears them both to secrecy. Both say they will never tell a soul, and this is why, one hour later, even before the State Police and the county medical and forensics guys have been called, everyone knows that the police have found a slaughterhouse out at Ed’s Eats. Half a dozen murdered kids.

  Maybe more.

  10

  AS THE CRUISER with Tom Lund behind the wheel noses down Third Street to Chase—roof-rack lights decorously dark, siren off—Dale takes out his wallet and begins digging through the mess in the back: business cards people have given him, a few dog-eared photographs, little licks of folded-over notebook paper. On one of the latter he finds what he wants.

  “Whatcha doin’, boss?” Tom asks.

  “None of your beeswax. Just drive the car.”

  Dale grabs the phone from its spot on the console, grimaces and wipes off the residue of someone’s powdered doughnut, then, without much hope, dials the number of Jack Sawyer’s cell phone. He starts to smile when the phone is answered on the fourth ring, but the smile metamorphoses into a frown of puzzlement. He knows that voice and should recognize it, but—

  “Hello?” says the person who has apparently answered Jack’s cell phone. “Speak now, whoever you are, or forever hold your peace.”

  Then Dale knows. Would have known immediately if he had been at home or in his office, but in this context—

  “Henry?” he says, knowing he sounds stupid but not able to help it. “Uncle Henry, is that you?”

  Jack is piloting his truck across the Tamarack Bridge when the cell phone in his pants pocket starts its annoying little tweet. He takes it out and taps the back of Henry’s hand with it. “Deal with this,” he says. “Cell phones give you brain cancer.”

  “Which is okay for me but not for you.”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Jack,” Henry says, and opens the phone with a nonchalant flick of the wrist. “Hello?” And, after a pause: “Speak now, whoever you are, or forever hold your peace.” Jack glances at him, then back at the road. They’re coming up on Roy’s Store, where the early shopper gets the best greens. “Yes, Dale. It is indeed your esteemed—” Henry listens, frowning a little bit and smiling a little bit. “I’m in Jack’s truck, with Jack,” he says. “George Rathbun isn’t working this morning because KDCU is covering the Summer Marathon over in La Riv—”

  He listens some more, then says: “If it’s a Nokia—which is what it feels like and sounds like—then it’s digital rather than analog. Wait.” He looks at Jack. “Your cell,” he says. “It’s a Nokia?”

  “Yes, but why—”

  “Because digital phones are supposedly harder to snoop,” Henry says, and goes back to the phone. “It’s a digital, and I’ll put him on. I’m sure Jack can explain everything.” Henry hands him the telephone, folds his hands primly in his lap, and looks out the window exactly as he would if surveying the scenery. And maybe he is, Jack thinks. Maybe in some weird fruit-bat way, he really is.

  He pulls over to the shoulder on Highway 93. He doesn’t like the cell phone to begin with—twenty-first-century slave bracelets, he thinks them—but he absolutely loathes driving while talking on one. Besides, Irma Freneau isn’t going anywhere this morning.

  “Dale?” he says.

  “Where are you?” Dale asks, and Jack knows at once that the Fisherman has been busy elsewhere, too. As long as it’s not another dead kid, he thinks. Not that, not yet, please. “How come you’re with Henry? Is Fred Marshall there, too?”

  Jack tells him about the change in plan, and is about to go on when Dale breaks in.

  “Whatever you’re doing, I want you to get your ass out to a place called Ed’s Eats and Dawgs, near Goltz’s. Henry can help you find it. The Fisherman called the station, Jack. He called 911. Told us Irma Freneau’s body is out there. Well, not in so many words, but he did say she.”

  Dale is not quite babbling, but almost. Jack notes this as any good clinician would note the symptoms of a patient.

  “I need you, Jack. I really—”

  “That’s where we were headed anyway,” Jack says quietly, although they are going absolutely nowhere at this moment, just sitting on the shoulder while the occasional car blips past on 93.

  “What?”

  Hoping that Dale and Henry are right about the virtues of digital technology, Jack tells French Landing’s police chief about his morning delivery, aware that Henry, although still looking out the window, is listening sharply. He tells Dale that Ty Marshall’s cap was on top of the box with the feathers and Irma’s foot inside it.

  “Holy . . .” Dale says, sounding out of breath. “Holy shit.”

  “Tell me what you’ve done,” Jack says, and Dale does. It sounds pretty good—so far, at least—but Jack doesn’t like the part about Arnold Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has impressed him as the sort of fellow who will never be able to behave like a real cop, no matter how hard he tries. Back in L.A., they used to call the Arnie Hrabowskis of the world Mayberry RFDs.

  “Dale, what about the phone at the 7-Eleven?”

  “It’s a pay phone,” Dale says, as if speaking to a child.

  “Yes, but there could be fingerprints,” Jack says. “I mean, there are going to be billions of fingerprints, but forensics can isolate the freshest. Easily. He might have worn gloves, but maybe not. If he’s leaving messages and calling cards as well as writing to the parents, he’s gone Stage Two. Killing isn’t enough for him anymore. He wants to play you now. Play with you. Maybe he even wants to be caught and stopped, like Son of Sam.”

  “The phone. Fresh fingerprints on the phone.” Dale sounds badly humiliated, and Jack’s heart goes out to him. “Jack, I can’t do this. I’m lost.”

  This is something to which Jack chooses not to speak. Instead he says, “Who’ve you got who can see to the phone?”

  “Dit Jesperson and Bobby Dulac, I guess.”

  Bobby, Jack thinks, is entirely too good to waste for long at the 7-Eleven outside town. “Just have them crisscross the phone with yellow tape and talk to the guy on duty. Then they can come on out to the site.”

  “Okay.” Dale hesitates, then asks a question. The defeat in it, the sense of almost complete abrogation, makes Jack sad. “Anything else?”

  “Have you called the State Police? County? Does that FBI guy know? The one who thinks he looks like Tommy Lee Jones?”

  Dale snorts. “Uh . . . actually, I’d decided to sit on notification for a little while.”

  “Good,” Jack says, and the savage satisfaction in his voice causes Henry to turn from his blind regard of the countryside and regard his friend instead, eyebrows raised.

  Let us rise up again—on wings as eagles, as the Reverend Lance Hovdahl, French Landing’s Lutheran pastor, might say—and fly down the black ribbon of Highway 93, back toward town. We reach Route 35 and turn right. Closer and to our right is the overgrown lane that leads not to a dragon’s hidden gold or secret dwarf mines but to that peculiarly unpleasant black house. A little farther on, we can see the futuristic dome shape of Goltz’s (well . . . it seemed futuristic in the seventies, at least). All our landmarks are in place, including the rubbly, weedy path that shoots off from the main road to the left. This is the track that leads to the remains of Ed Gilbertson’s erstwhile palace of guilty pleasures.

  Let us flutter onto the telephone line just across from
this track. Hot gossip tickles our birdy feet: Paula Hrabowski’s friend Myrtle Harrington passing on the news of the dead body (or bodies) at Ed’s to Richie Bumstead, who will in turn pass it on to Beezer St. Pierre, grieving father and spiritual leader of the Thunder Five. This passage of voices through the wire probably shouldn’t please us, but it does. Gossip is no doubt nasty stuff, but it does energize the human spirit.

  Now, from the west comes the cruiser with Tom Lund at the wheel and Dale Gilbertson in the shotgun seat. And from the east comes Jack’s burgundy-colored Ram pickup. They reach the turnoff to Ed’s at the same time. Jack motions for Dale to go first, then follows him. We take wing, fly above and then ahead of them. We roost on the rusty Esso gas pump to watch developments.

  Jack drives slowly down the lane to the half-collapsed building that stands in a scruff of high weeds and goldenrod. He’s looking for any sign of passage, and sees only the fresh tracks made by Dale and Tom’s police car.

  “We’ve got the place to ourselves,” he informs Henry.

  “Yes, but for how long?”

  Not very would have been Jack’s answer, had he bothered to give one. Instead, he pulls up next to Dale’s car and gets out. Henry rolls down his window but stays put, as ordered.

  Ed’s was once a simple wooden building about the length of a Burlington Northern boxcar and with a boxcar’s flat roof. At the south end, you could buy sof’-serve ice cream from one of three windows. At the north end you could get your nasty hot dog or your even nastier order of fish and chips to go. In the middle was a small sit-down restaurant featuring a counter and red-top stools. Now the south end has entirely collapsed, probably from the weight of snow. All the windows have been broken in. There’s some graffiti—So-and-so chugs cock, we fucked Patty Jarvis untill she howelled, TROY LUVS MARYANN—but not as much as Jack might have expected. All but one of the stools have been looted. Crickets are conversing in the grass. They’re loud, but not as loud as the flies inside the ruined restaurant. There are lots of flies in there, a regular fly convention in progress. And—