Thirty-four
The phone alongside the den computer rang at dawn.
John snatched the handset from the cradle on the second ring and gave a
mutter of acknowledgment. "Roy Rockingham ran his rig off a cliff Friday
afternoon," Sheriff Gene Packerson said. "He took a retired couple and
their camper with him."
John swung his legs off the cot and sat up. "Not
likely an accident, Gene."
"Thinking the same thing myself. Watch your back,
John."
"I'm on it."
John set the phone quietly in place. In the silence
that ensued, he calculated his chances of going it alone. They didn't
amount to much.
"Joyce?"
Joyce Blair, the mirror's version of Joyce Blair, did
not answer.
He had a choice. He could use any and all resources
at his disposal to defend himself and David, or let himself be passively
taken out by a man he had never met and circumstances beyond his control.
"Okay, I'll play your game," he said to the empty room. Whatever it
takes."
"Did you wish to speak with me, John?"
He had no time to brace himself for the experience.
The sound of her voice was electrifying. She sat at the computer desk
with a manuscript in her hand. She lowered her wire-frame glasses to the
end of her nose and peer at him over the top with her big brown eyes.
David had his mother's eyes.
The lump in his throat was more like having his heart
ripped from his chest. He had yet to shed a single tear over his wife's
death. The pain was damned up inside him, slowly eating its way out and
probably killing him in the process. He simply did not know how to let it
go.
"Gene forced me to identify my wife's remains after
the accident. It was his way of punishing me for what I had done. I
buried my wife, damn you. She's dead and I killed her. I don't see how
you can expect me to put up with this sick joke."
But a deep part of himself that knew nothing of the
irrevocability of death was glad to see her again. She gazed at him and
said nothing.
"David and I are sitting behind an eight ball because
of you. Kahl thinks I killed his ten-year-old daughter. I don't
understand why he has been so quick to assume my guilt. We've never met,
but if he's checked me out, he must know I'm not a likely suspect. What's
going on?"
"I don't have that information, John," Marlene said
softly.
"You don't have it? It's not we anymore?"
She opened her mouth to speak.
He raised his hand. "I don't want to hear it. The
mirror was first on your to-do list. Where do you want it moved?"
"To the forest below the road," she said.
"Gene has a surveillance team down there. Can we do
it without being seen?"
"We will not be seen, but it must be done now if at
all."
He went upstairs to check on the weather. He donned
a pair of pull-over boots and a water-repellent nylon jacket to deal with
the heavy morning fog blowing over the Ridge. He paused at the back
door.
"What about David?"
"I will watch over David," Marlene's disembodied
voice said.
"And if someone tries to break into the house while
I'm gone? What can you do?"
The door in front of him vanished. He stood facing
an unbroken wall. In an instant, the wall collapsed, exposing wall studs
and plaster slats. John leaped back from the tumbling debris and choked
on billowing dust. Briefly, he caught a view of an unending desert
glaring beyond. A yellow and white striped tiger fully eight feet in
length turned to him fluidly and crouched in sudden alertness. Its
ominous growl reverberated in his gut.
The cat leaped.
The illusion ceased an instant before the animal
reached him.
John backed against the kitchen table, slamming it
against the kitchen counter. He took a moment to catch his breath.
When he recovered, he locked the house behind him
regardless and trudged through the dew-laden grass of the slope toward the
distant stand of trees feeling more vulnerable and defenseless than at any
time in his life. An early fog had visibility trimmed to mere yards.
Moisture so saturated the air that it was hard to breath. When he pushed
his way through the underbrush to the mirror, he stopped a safe distance
and awaited instructions.
The mirror changed shape. The edges grew dark and
contracted. The middle section bulged, and the reflectivity turned to
flat black. The mirror slowly transformed into a featureless flat-black
sphere roughly eighteen inches in diameter.
"It is safe to touch," Marlene said softly
among his thoughts.
John had no reason to doubt her word. He had no
defense against it in any case. The world as a whole probably had no
defense against it. If it meant harm, no human agency was going to stop
it.
John reached down and rested both hands on the
sphere. It felt tepid to the touch and soft. He hoisted it into the air
to test its weight and almost lost his grip. The sphere had the weight of
Styrofoam plastic. He backed from the trees with the artifact tucked
beneath one arm and started down the hill to the highway.
Despite Marlene's assurance that he would not be
seen, his sense of anticipation peaked approaching the highway. He paused
when the road appeared to view in the fog. Ben Reeves paced the far
shoulder of the road with his thirty-eight revolver clutched in his right
hand.
Standing guard. Over what?
The rhythm of his heartbeat accelerated. He measured
his pace crossing the highway behind the hapless deputy, keeping his eyes
to the road in front of him and leaving it up to Marlene to follow through
with her assurance that he would not be seen.
He slid down a rain slickened hill of mud, turned
onto a meandering deer trail, and started through the knee high underbrush
beneath towering conifers. Despite the morning brightening above the
canopy of the towering conifers, he moved into a deepening gloom. He
walked for ten minutes.
He spotted one of Sheriff Packerson's cruiser's
parked on a dirt access road dead ahead. He stopped and sidestepped
behind cover.
"Marlene, what's going on?"
The forest swallowed the sound of his voice. Marlene
did not respond. She had deserted him. Or was there more to it than
that? Had this confrontation been orchestrated?
If Ben Reeves had been nervously pacing the highway
with a drawn revolver, he could assume that Jim Langton was nearby and up
to no good. He had no idea of what was happening, but he had a deep and
powerful premonition that Marlene had dropped him into the middle of
something nasty.
Having scattered several deer ahead of him, he took
for granted his approach had been detected. He had a choice of beating a
hasty retreat, or indulging his curiosity and leaving it up to Marlene to
safeguard him. Only on an intellectual level did he know he was in no
danger. On an emotional level, Jim Langton had him in his sights and he
was a dead man.
Disregarding the need for caution, he sidestepped
from cover and scanned the area around the car in search of some evidence
of the nature of events in progress. He continued to sidestep, slowly
broadening his perspective of the area. Given a view of the ground in
front of the car, he saw the pale body of a woman clearly visible against
the dark earth. A hunting knife protruded from the ground alongside her
head. She lay sprawled on her back, unmoving.
He watched her breasts for movement. Satisfied that
she was still alive, his focus shifted to her face. He had seen her only
once at the substation. Once had been enough to burn beauty of that
intensity into his memory forever.
Sheila Davies.
Slowly, John squatted and set the sphere on the
ground beside him. If he had not been spotted, he needed to back himself
from danger and go for help. He turned slowly away and dropped to his
hands and knees to keep a low profile.
"Don't bother, Hartman. Stand up and let's see your
hands."
The voice came from directly behind him. John stood
and turned with his hands held well away from his sides.
Jim Langton's lean silhouette emerged from the haze,
his service clutched in his right hand and an expression of twisted
perplexity on his face. "What the hell are you doing out here?"
John glanced at the unconscious woman and resisted
the temptation to ask Jim the same question. He'd know soon enough.
"What the hell, I can damn well guess what you're
doing out here," Jim said. "Show me the graves, Hartman."
John hated to go off on that tangent. "There aren't
any graves, Jim."
"Like hell, you arrogant bastard. You've been making
everyone crazy with your tricks, but you never had me fooled for a moment.
Maybe you're holding the Kahl girl for ransom down here somewhere, but
they can't all be alive. Show me the closest grave or consider the ground
you're standing on your own."
John shrugged his helplessness. "I don't have
anything to show."
A sickly grin contorted on Jim’s pale face. "You're
caught red-handed, you fool. There's no way you can talk your way out of
his. Either you show me something I'm damn well expecting to see, or I'm
going to save Packerson and the justice system as a whole a major
headache. You tried to run and I put a bullet in you. Nobody's going to
hold it against me. You're too damned dangerous. You were always too
damned dangerous."
John felt a gut-felt despair. Maybe the sphere at
his feet was going to let him die after all. He had always feared this
moment, the day when his back would be against a wall, a gun to his head,
and no means of escape open to him.
Jim raised the revolver and drew back the hammer.
"I'm not playing games with you. I'm not counting to three or any of that
bullshit. Tell me what I want to hear before my patience wears out. I'm
not giving you any more warning."
"What's with the girl?" John said blandly. He had
nothing to lose by asking.
"When I'm finished with her, the girl gets hung by
her heels, gutted and field dressed. You get blamed for it. Ben and me
get credit for ending your career. If you have an organ donor's card, let
me know and I'll try not to damage the merchandise. You've got to be good
for something, you miserable bastard."
John allowed himself a knowing grin. "Kahl's playing
his expendable cards first. Roy was sure as hell expendable.
It looks to me like you come in a close second."
Jim gripped the revolver a bit tighter and brought
his aim up a little higher. "I only need to trust Kahl far enough to get
paid for a job, Hartman."
"What's it all for? His missing daughter?”
"What the hell else, do you think?"
"Kahl wouldn't kill a man on guesswork alone.
There's something more to it."
Jim Langton gave the thought due consideration.
"That’s his business. Mine is putting a stop to whatever you’ve been up
to.”
John forgot about Marlene. She had no bearing on the
reality of the moment. He felt himself giving up the long and miserable
battle for some semblance of a life worth living. Too much had been taken
from him by forces beyond his control. There was nothing more he could do
for himself with his ruined hand or for David and his ruined heart. He
felt a deep despondency for David, but no fear for himself. He took
comfort knowing he’d be dead in a moment or two, and it would be as if he
had never existed. He had no fear of death.
But fear of another kind jolted him in the next
moment. Jim was staring him in the eye, and as John watched, his focus
shifted perceptibly off to one side along with the aim of his handgun.
Spooked by the phenomena, but more that willing to take advantage of it,
John sidestepped in the opposite direction and slowly lowered his arms. He glanced around to see what held
Jim's unwavering focus of attention.
A man dressed like himself standing at his side
startled him violently. He had looked upon his own features in a mirror
on a daily basis for his entire life. This was different, and he didn't
like what he saw, the gray speckled hair grown shaggy on his collar, the
grim expression beginning to line with age, and the rugged physique
looking bent and defeated. The
John Hartman at his side was not the warrior he had been in
earlier decades. Resignation showed in the face of death.
The flesh of Jim's trigger finger grew white with
tension. John opened his mouth to shout a warning.
The gun cracked and bucked in Jim's hand. John heard the sound of a body
hitting the ground. The air filled with the sharp stench of cordite.
He shared Jim Langton's
hallucination. He saw himself lying dying on the ground. Glazed eyes
fluttered, open to the sky. An expression of mild surprise smoothed over
to a death mask. A wound in the chest spurted blood for an instant, then
abated. Fingertips trembled. The chest fell with a final rattling sigh.
A bald-faced trick, all of it.
Jim took deep breaths to calm himself. He eyed
the surrounding shadows, then holstered his weapon. With his eyes on his
fallen victim, and his expression grim and icily calm, he strolled
confidently forward to confirm his kill.
John had forgotten about the black sphere. Jim had
never seen it. It had transformed again. In its place, an
irregularly-shaped pool of perfect reflectivity had spread out over the
forest floor, lying directly in Jim's path.
"Jim, watch out!"
He was not a part of Jim's reality in that moment.
His cry of warning was not heard. Jim's right foot passed through the
reflectivity without rippling the surface. With out flung arms, the
man plunged face first through the mirror and vanished from sight.
Clothing popped into view a few seconds later and
came to rest upon the surface. Three gold teeth rattled onto the top of
the mirror followed by the more solid-sounding thunk of the revolver and
holster. The slight grade of the forest floor resolved the problem of
accumulating debris. Slowly, Jim Langton’s possessions slid downhill and rolled onto the bare earth.
John turned away. He managed to put twenty feet
between himself and the mirror before he dropped to his knees and
vomited. He waited for Marlene to reappear and to make some futile
attempt to defend herself. When nothing happened, he thought first of
putting as much distance between himself and the mirror as possible, and
then remembered the unconscious body Sheila Davies.
He closed half the distance to the car before he saw
that she was gone. The glimmer of the brightening morning against the
chromed blade of the hunting knife fixed her new position crouched in the
bushes a short distance away, floundering and uncoordinated in the
aftermath of whatever had rendered her unconscious. She dropped to her
knees and crawled frantically into denser cover. John didn’t know what to
say to her.
"Who the hell are you!" she called out to him,
knowing she had been seen, knowing as well that she had little ability to
defend herself. Even so, the sheer intensity of her anger caught him
by surprise. Having awakened naked in the middle of a forest by the
sound of a gunshot, she had pulled herself together surprisingly well.
"John Hartman!" he called back to her. "I live up on
the Ridge!"
"I know who you are! Is he dead?"
If she had been conscious
during his confrontation with Jim
Langton, the fact that a shot had rang out and he had survived would be an
indication, at the very least, that Langton had been overpowered in some
manner. He doubted if she had seen Jim's fall into oblivion.
"Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t know what else to say to
her.
She brushed a hand across her face, and squinted in
the twilight sprinkled with morning sunshine. "What are you doing here?
Where the hell am I?”
"We're near the highway just below the Ridge. Ben
Reeves is standing guard. He’s bound to be on his way down. I don't
think we should hang around."
She rose to her feet, clutching a sapling for
support. She had a body to match her face, both fit for a goddess.
She pointed the trembling hunting knife at him. "Quit
looking at me! Find me something to wear!"
John sidestepped to snatch the car keys from the pile
of Jim Langton's clothing. He opened the trunk of the car, took a quick
inventory of a first aid kit and flares and tossed the woman one of two
blankets.
She drew the blanket about her shoulders. Letting go
of the tree, she promptly dropped to her knees.
John started forward to help.
The knife came up again. "Keep the hell away from me. I'll manage."
Clutching the blanket together at her throat, she
made her unsteady way to the car and crawled into the back seat. Curling
up against a door, she groaned in misery and fought to stay awake.
Moving slowly, John slipped behind the wheel. He
started the engine and eased the car into motion. He recognized the trail. It
would take them back up to the highway within a quarter mile.
"Take me home," she
murmured. She gave him an address. John drove and said
nothing. They drove in silence for half the distance to town.
"Don't tell Gene," she said.
"I wouldn't have much to tell. I don’t know what
happened.”
"It was Jim Langton, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, it was Jim."
"I heard a shot. Is he dead?
Yes or no."
"The shot was for me. He missed."
She was quiet long enough to process the
information.
"He’s not dead?”
“He's plenty dead enough.”
She let his cryptic statement slide for the time
being. "You're John Hartman," she said, and bluntly added, "Did you kill
those missing people?"
"No."
"That's what Gene
believes. Do you know if they are dead or alive?"
He sighed in despair. Who
would ever believe such a story? "No. I can't say either way."
Her breathing was uneven and shaky. She sounded ill
and in pain. An impressive level of self-discipline had gone into setting
aside her personal trauma for the sake of business. "I need to keep this
quiet," she said. "Will you help me do that?”
"I’m cooperating one hundred percent," John said.
"I'll drop you off where you say, park the car a few blocks away and walk
home. I got problems of my own."
"Yeah, I imagine you do."
And, after a time: "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
As instructed, he turned into the alley behind the
address she had given and pulled as close to the back door as he could.
She climbed from the car and walked an unsteady line to the door. She
seemed surprised to find it open. Glancing back at him briefly, already
letting the blanket slide away, she went inside and closed the door behind
her.
John abandoned the car halfway to the Ridge and
started up the highway on foot. The sun broke through scattered clouds
and flooded the world in brilliant golden light. "Is David still
sleeping?" he asked of Marlene, confident that she’d respond now. She had
gotten what she wanted of him.
Marlene appeared at his side wearing one of her
flower print house dresses. "He's still sleeping."
"He's sick."
"Yes, he is."
As long as she understood the stakes of the game she
was playing, John had nothing more to say to her.
