Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  Miraculously, though, the Toyota did not veer off the highway. It continued its slide another fifty yards or so, gradually slowing with gravity, with Deal’s tentative taps at the brakes. They finally came to a halt, the snout of the vehicle still pointed firmly back in the direction they’d come from.

  Deal discovered he could breathe again, and peeled his fingers from the wheel. He sat massaging feeling back into his hands, noticed the engine had stalled, noticed the deafening silence that had descended. Snow drifted lazily through the shattered window, threatening his view of the overpass they’d skated under, now a dim line at the horizon. No lights. No sound of Kittle’s truck in the distance. Nothing. Where to now, Mr. Deal?

  He reached for the ignition, held his breath momentarily, closed his eyes in thanks as the Toyota’s engine responded with a growl. He backed gingerly into a tight turn, hesitated, then flipped on his headlights. Snow piling down heavily again, dim ruts of traffic ahead of him, but were those Kittle’s tracks, already filling up?

  He thought a moment, then pressed the dome light button, found the welcome packet that he’d tossed aside. It had slid to the floor, disgorging its contents, and he had to rummage through the soggy welter of papers for several moments until he found the road map he’d prayed would be there. The Beef Council was nothing if not thorough, he thought as he unfolded it.

  He held the wet map up to the light, shook away a crust of dirty ice, found Omaha, the airport, the road they must have taken. He checked the trip odometer, shook his head at the short distance he’d traveled. It seemed he’d been driving forever. He consulted the map scale, did some quick calculations, retraced what he hoped was the route he’d taken.

  He found a wavering blue line leading away from the highway at what seemed like the right spot, a state or county road that curled eastward into a bulge of land outlined by a bend in the Missouri River. No towns marked there. No bridge. No reason for a road that he could tell. Big beef ranchland, maybe. A road to a subdivision yet to become. He checked again. The main highway they’d been traveling was some kind of belt road. If he was correct, it would turn back west, toward the city, a mile or so up ahead.

  He strained to see into the darkness, but it was hopeless. Even if Kittle had taken that route, the thought of gaining ground under these conditions was absurd. Kittle would reach the city long before Deal, there’d be any number of exits, he could never hope to guess which way Kittle had taken…

  Deal bit his lip in decision, spun the Toyota into another turn, then headed back, down the highway, pressing the accelerator as fully as he dared. Wasn’t this how Janice’s parents had bought it, it occurred to him. Heading the wrong way down an ice-slick highway? Some irony in that, he thought, but he’d consider it another day.

  He held the accelerator firm, speeding back under the overpass, past the exit itself, slowing only when he saw the back side of the exit marker as it loomed up out of the blowing snow. Gentle taps on the brakes now, Deal. A controlled skid this time and an easy, controlled power slide, finishing up with the headlights on the sign, which on this side he found covered by an impenetrable blanket of frozen snow.

  Deal stared at the sign for a moment, nodding. Nothing less than he might have expected. Nothing was going to be easy. He gripped the wheel tightly, aimed the Land Cruiser, pressed the accelerator down. There was a roar from the engine, and a series of bumps as they left the pavement and shot across the shoulder. An instant of clear sailing, then, and a sudden thud that sent Deal rocking forward as the Toyota’s brush cutter slammed into one of the heavy aluminum poles supporting the sign.

  Snow cascaded down in a mini-avalanche, flurries roiling into the Toyota’s cabin, filling his lungs with a breath-stopping gulp that was more frozen crystals than air. Chunks of ice thundered off the Toyota’s top and hood, but Deal was already in reverse, churning back over the frozen shoulder, dusting snow from his face and shoulders.

  “…IDE CHURCH…F…IGHT,” he read now, white letters against a green background in gaps where the snow and ice had fallen away, and he found himself wondering if it was a sign the taxpayers had paid for. It didn’t really matter, though, did it? He knew now where he had to go. He dropped the Toyota into low and hit the accelerator again, this time following the arrow he’d missed the first time, and the dim outline of Kittle’s tracks.

  ***

  Deal risked his lights for a while longer, letting them burn until he had swung about, crossed the overpass himself, and picked up the shadows of a stand of trees up ahead. No way to tell what might lie in there, he thought, flipping the switch that sent the road back into darkness. He held the wheel grimly, pointing himself toward the gloomy smudge that was the grove, waiting impatiently for his eyes to adjust once again.

  Once Kittle got where he was going, everything was going to become vastly more complicated. How would he approach the man under such conditions, he wondered? How on earth would Deal reach him without endangering Janice more than she already was…

  He forced those questions away, and then he was into the grove of trees, all the light reflected from the vast blanket of snow abruptly cut off, and he found himself driving utterly on faith. There could be a cliff up ahead, a frozen lake, a brick wall, who the hell knew? Hit the brakes, he’d surely slide off the road, keep going it could be even worse.

  What a joke, he thought. What a pathetic, sickening joke. Maybe Arch was somewhere where he could appreciate the madness of it all, though Arch would be fretting it was all his fault Deal was in such a fix.

  Not your fault at all, good buddy, Deal thought, willing his thoughts into the ether. All you wanted to do was sell good books, turn people on to the things you’d come to love, do a small, decent thing in a bloated, overgrown world, and look what it cost. Not your fault at all.

  Deal thought he might have repeated the words out loud this time, wondering if it was about to end, one last tumble into a ditch, a snow-bank, maybe the goddamned Missouri River…

  And then he was through, back out into the bright plain again, the snow abated suddenly, the moon breaking through the clouds, the Land Cruiser steady on course. The road was a straight shot along a ridge, then came a long, slow descent, where in the distance the yellow cone of Kittle’s truck lights bobbed and ducked like something from an animator’s pen.

  And there, in a valley below, their apparent destination was laid out: a series of lights marking what seemed at first to be a village. Town hall here, church spires there, a picturesque, tree-lined lake…and on the other side, some sort of arena with a huge parking lot, all of it connected by strings of amber vapor lights marking the winding streets.

  He saw a cluster of strange structures on the opposite ridgeline—satellite dishes, he realized, clustered near a microwave relay station. A town into communicating in a big way, he thought. And he might have gone on convincing himself he was headed into some modern version of Duckburg or Appleville or Prettytown if he hadn’t just then passed the big building with the massive sign illuminated out front.

  He wasn’t sure he’d read correctly at first, had to turn in his seat to read the glowing letters on the sign’s opposite face. He’d seen such elaborate signage before. Certain builders couldn’t help themselves, so seduced by the feelings that come with lives of moving monster machines and leveling mountains and sending steel and glass towers to touch the sky, it seemed only natural to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a living marble monument to yourself. “Look what I can do,” they say, it said. Huge polished slabs rising up from a pedestal of boulders like stone metamorphosed into purpose, two-foot steel letters backlit in light so ghostly, so intense, that it seemed shot out from radium, plutonium, kryptonite.

  Carver Construction, Deal read, nodding. His hands seemed frozen to the wheel. He glanced down into the valley that looked so placid and inviting from this vantage point. Forget Duckburg. He was descending to the village of the damned.

  Chapter 24

  �
��What you find out, it’s how confining such a life is,” Willis was saying. “I know it sounds like whining, but that’s the truth of it.”

  He’d dragged a more comfortable chair from one of the sound-mixing consoles, found a portable refrigerator, was sitting where she’d have to look at him any time she opened her eyes, sipping some designer seltzer from what looked like a hand-painted bottle. His clothes were in place, his hair neatly combed, but the flush had not left his cheeks, and his eyes glittered, dancing about the room.

  “There’s no normal, everyday going out in the world anymore,” he said, “because everybody wants something from you, even if it’s just to say hello.”

  He sat back in his seat, shaking his head, then popped forward again almost immediately. “You get sick of saying hello to people that just want to go home and say, ‘Guess who said hello to me today,’ never mind the ones that really come after you, got a deal, or a bone to pick, or maybe they think I still lay on hands and when I finish supper wouldn’t I come out to the Winnebago where Uncle Art’s all stove up with bone cancer, see what I might could do.”

  He drank deeply from his bottle of water, stared up at the ceiling. “That was another lifetime,” he mused. “Before I saw the light.”

  He turned back to her then, leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “I’m going to tell you something, Sara.” His face was as bland with self-involvement as a schoolboy’s, his speech less studied, as if the careful façade he’d worked so hard to build were giving way at last.

  “It was you as much as anybody who helped me see where this was headed, you realize that? Seven, eight years ago, I didn’t know what a computer was, not really, not till you came along, brought us into the twenty-first century.”

  She closed her eyes, bit the inside of her lip in despair. Wonderful, she thought. She’d helped make a monster even worse.

  “Of course I know you were just doing a job for us, didn’t have your eyes on the prize, but that’s to be expected.” He waved his hands about in a gesture of magnanimity. “But I caught your fever. You believed and you made a believer out of me, especially once I saw how important this was going to be. The television’s important, of course, but it’s no longer the boss. It’s just a little part of the big picture. Telephone, television, movies, radio, cable, books, magazines, newspapers, even the computer’s a part of it, your World Wide Web.” He ticked the items off on his fingers, formed his fingers into fists, which he held up before her face.

  “It took all this talk about what was going to go on all these webs and cables and channels to get me thinking, you see. All those people out there fighting amongst themselves about making up programs,” he said dismissively. “I understood that’s all I used to do, and that’s what got me out of the miracle business.”

  He banged his fists together, then opened up his palms, his face gone from frown to beatific smile in an instant. “I spent a lifetime worrying about getting out the word. Find some dramatic way to get the word out, I thought. Tell the folks how it is. I was worried about the message, you see, and that was all wrong.” He shook a thick finger in the air between them. “First thing is, Jimmy Ray, I said, you get yourself hold of the means of distribution. Once you have the means, then you’re in the catbird seat. The means becomes the message.”

  She stared at his beaming face, wondering if, even if there were no tape across her mouth, she’d have the nerve to tell him someone had had the thought a few decades before.

  “That’s why the networks are hurting. Their programs aren’t any different, any worse. They lost their stranglehold on the means of distribution, that’s all.” He glanced around for his bottle of water, found it, polished it off.

  “Same thing applies to books. You don’t have to fool around with the publishers and the editors. You get yourself hold of the means of distribution, and then the editors and the publishers—for that matter the writers themselves—they’ll have to fall into line sooner or later. Your brother understood that, God rest his soul.” He gave her a look as if Arch’s murder were a regrettable but necessary detail.

  “Sure, it’s going to take a while, and you get your little bumps along the way, fools like Rosenhaus think they’re smarter, more important than they are.” He shrugged. “But the important thing is to hold fast to a vision.” He nodded sagely at her. “You work along in the right direction, that’s all that’s important. Control the means, then the minds come easy.”

  He reached out, patted her cheek gently. “But that’s enough for now,” he said. “It’s getting late, and I’m keeping you up.” He rose from his chair, adjusted his trousers, smiled down at her.

  “I tell myself,” he said, and held up his palm before his face, as if it were a book to read, “‘James Ray, it’s not too late for Sara. She’s a bright woman, she’s someone special just like you always thought.’” He paused, shook his head sorrowfully, held up his other hand as if it were a facing page. “But there’s another part of me says otherwise. Tells me we’ve run out our string.”

  He folded his hands together, stared at her sorrowfully. “The saddest thing is, I’ve got to the point where I understand that it doesn’t matter, Sara. It’s a concern what happens, I admit it. But it’s a small concern compared to all this other.” He broke off, waved his hands about the room. “You, your brother, Martin Rosenhaus…” He shook his head again. “You matter, of course…but you just don’t matter an awful lot.”

  He smiled at her, made a gesture. “Would you like to go to the bathroom now?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut tightly, fighting tears of fury, of anger, shook her head violently back and forth. She’d burst, she’d die first…and yes, she probably would die, she thought. He would kill her. He would kill her soon.

  “Now what the hell do you suppose that is?” she heard Willis say, and opened her eyes to see him moving toward the big control panel behind him.

  Willis bent over the board, a puzzled expression coming over his face as lights flashed and meters danced. Willis punched a series of buttons, and a bank of monitors on the wall above the console popped into life: the cavernous convocation center, empty. The reception center lobby, also empty. The vast parking lot where she’d been captured, a vast expanse of snow. Willis moved a switch and the view of the parking lot tightened. Tire tracks there, it seemed. Willis fiddled with a joystick and the camera angle swung up from the parking lot onto the facade of the Convocation Center, the cradle of the Worldwide Church of Light.

  A boxy four-wheel drive vehicle had been parked hastily there, two wheels up on the snow-covered sidewalk, a set of foot tracks leading toward the entrance where one set of glass doors yawned open to the gusting wind. Snow drifting inside, a mini-glacier forming in the ever-flowing Stream of Mercy.

  Willis flipped another switch and six different angles of the interior of the chapel filled the monitors. Row upon row of empty seats. Vacant aisles. Choir loft big enough to hold the entire congregation of most churches, also empty. A stage so vast the Red Sea could be parted there, also empty, or almost empty.

  Another switch, and a zoom-in upon the pulpit. A tall, gaunt man standing there, his face drawn and battered, a picture of the country preacher clutching the sides of the lectern and imploring his congregation soundlessly, what looked like a bundle of rags on the floor near his feet. She’d seen him before, she knew she had.

  “She says she needs help, hon.”

  “Why, of course she does.”

  The two of them, out in the very same parking lot that had been illuminated on the screens, moments before. She’d thought she’d been saved then, and look what had happened.

  Willis rammed a button with the heel of his hand and suddenly there was sound issuing from the tall man’s lips:

  “…if you’re down there, wherever you are, there’s trouble. I’ve lost Dora. I don’t know what’s happened to her. Maybe she’s come back here, I don’t know. We need some direction here, James Ray, big time.
” He broke off, gestured at the lump of rags at his feet. “I brought one of them back, like you said. I took care of her husband, but we had some problems. I just don’t know what you want to do now.”

  Willis slammed his hand down, cutting off the audio. “Lord God Almighty,” he said, already on the way toward the door of the bunker. Though the words were spoken softly, his expression suggested that wrath was sure to fall. “If the man wasn’t my own flesh and blood, I don’t know what the hell I’d do with him.”

  Chapter 25

  Deal had just rounded the last curve that would send him down toward the cluster of buildings laid out below when he saw the gates. He should have expected something like this, of course. Private road, private compound, after all, you could do whatever you wanted. It could have been worse, though. It could have been guard gates, hurricane fence, armed sentries.

  Instead it was a modestly landscaped entry, matching raised mounds on either side of the road, a little traffic circle in the middle where a cluster of boulders and sandstone slabs had been arranged, something that was probably a rock waterfall in the summer. There was another mausoleum-styled sign informing visitors that they had finally reached Mecca, or in this case, the home of the Worldwide Church of Light.

  A set of welded pipe gates guarded both sides of the circle, each painted bright yellow and bound to a matching stanchion by a length of chain. Boldly lettered signs affixed to the gates advised Deal that the grounds were closed and invited him to come again.

  As he got closer, he saw how Kittle had handled the matter of the gates: a fresh set of tire tracks swung around the right-hand gate between it and the big stone marker. Kittle had taken out one of the floodlights that illuminated the sign, had in fact clipped the edge of the stone, knocking off a chunk at its corner.