"I'm here, Polly-what is it?"
For a moment there was only silence. Somewhere, deep within it, was the faint mutter of other voices on other calls. He had time to wonder if he had lost the connection... time to almost hope he had.
"Alan, I know this line is open," she said, "but you'll know what I'm talking about. How could you? How could you?"
Something was familiar about this conversation. Something.
"Polly, I'm not understanding you-"
"Oh, I think you are," she replied. Her voice was growing thicker, harder to understand, and Alan realized that if she wasn't crying, she soon would be. "It's hard to find out you don't know a person the way you thought you did. It's hard to find out the face you thought you loved is only a mask."
Something familiar, right, and now he knew what it was. This was like the nightmares he'd had following the deaths of Annie and Todd, the nightmares in which he stood on the side of the road and watched them go past in the Scout. They were on their way to die. He knew it, but he was helpless to change it. He tried to wave his arms but they were too heavy. He tried to shout and couldn't remember how to open his mouth. They drove by him as if he were invisible, and this was like that, too-as if he had become invisible to Polly in some weird way.
"Annie-" He realized with horror whose name he had said, and backtracked. "Polly. I don't know what you're talking about, Polly, but-"
"You do!" she screamed at him suddenly. "Don't say you don't when you do! Why couldn't you wait for me to tell you, Alan? And if you couldn't wait, why couldn't you ask? Why did you have to go behind my back? How could you go behind my back?"
He shut his eyes tight in an effort to catch hold of his racing, confused thoughts, but it did no good. A hideous picture came instead: Mike Horton from the Norwayjournal-Register, bent over the newspaper's Bearcat scanner, furiously taking notes in his pidgin shorthand.
"I don't know what it is you think I've done, but you've got it wrong. Let's get together, talk-"
"No. I don't think I can see you now, Alan."
"Yes. You can. And you're going to. I'll bThen Henry Payton's voice cut in. Why don't you do i't right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry HumP, South Dakota?
"You'll be what?" she was asking. "You'll be what?"
"I just remembered something," Alan said slowly.
"Oh, did you? Was it a letter you wrote at the beginning of September, Alan? A letter to San Francisco?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Polly. I can't come now because there's been a break in... in the other thing. But later-" She spoke to him through a series of gasping sobs that should have made her hard to understand but didn't. "Don't you get it, Alan? There is no later, not anymore. You-"
"Polly, please-"
"No! just leave me alone! Leave me alone, you snooping, prying son of a bitch!"
Bink!
And suddenly Alan was listening to that open telephone line hum again. He looked around the intersection of Main and School like a man who doesn't know where he is and has no clear understanding of how he got there. His eyes had the faraway, puzzled expression often seen in the eyes of fighters in the last few seconds before their knees come unhinged and they go sprawling to the canvas for a long winter's nap.
How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?
He hadn't the slightest idea. The whole town seemed to have gone slightly nuts in the last week or so... and now Polly was infected, too.
Bink!
"Urn... Sheriff?" It was Sheila, and Alan knew from her hushed, tentative tone that she'd had her ears on during at least part of his conversation with Polly. "Alan, are you there? Come back?"
He felt a sudden urge, amazingly strong, to rip the mike out of its socket and throw it into the bushes beyond the sidewalk. Then drive away. Anywhere. just stop thinking about everything and drive down the sun.
Instead he gathered all of his forces and made himself think of Hugh Priest. That's what he had to do, because -t now looked as if maybe Hugh had brought about the deaths of two women. Hugh was his business right now, not Polly... and he discovered a great sense of relief hiding in that.
He pushed the TRANSMIT button. "Here, Sheila. Ten-four."
"Alan, I think I lost the connection with Polly. I... um... didn't mean to listen, but-"
"That's okay, Sheila; we were done."
(There was something horrible about that, but he refused to think of it now.) "Who's there with you right now? Ten-four?"
"John's catching," Sheila said, obviously relieved at the turn in the conversation. "Clut's out on patrol. Near Castle View, according to his last ten-twenty."
"Okay." Polly's face, suffused with alien anger, tried to swim to the surface of his mind. He forced it back and concentrated on Hugh Priest again. But for one terrible second he could see no faces at all; only an awful blankness.
"Alan? You there? Ten-four?"
"Yes. You bet. Call Clut and tell him to get on over to Hugh Priest's house near the end of Castle Hill Road. He'll know where.
I imagine Hugh's at work, but if he does happen to be taking the day off, I'll want Clut to pick him up and bring him in for questioning. Ten-four?"
"Ten-four, Alan."
"Tell him to proceed with extreme caution. Tell him Hugh is wanted for questioning in the deaths of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck.
He should be able to fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.
Ten-four."
"Oh!" Sheila sounded both alarmed and excited. "Ten-four, Sheriff."
"I'm on my way to the town motor pool. I expect to find Hugh there. Ten-forty over and out."
As he racked the mike (it felt as if he had been holding it for at least four years) he thought: If you'd told Polly what you just put on the air to Sheila, this situation you've got on your hands might be a little less nasty.
Or it might not-how could he tell such a thing when he didn't know what the situation was? Polly had accused him of prying... of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped.
Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up-and-hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.
This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead-finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettle's dog, Raider.
For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon's engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly's face-not Hugh's-he saw in his mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
At about the same time Alan was heading across town to arrest Hugh Priest, Henry Beaufort was standing in his driveway and looking at his Thunderbird. The note he'd found under the windshield wiper was in one hand. The damage the chickenshit bastard had done to the tires was bad, but the tires could be replaced. It was the scratch he had drawn along the car's right-hand side that really toasted Henry's ass.
He looked at the note again and read it aloud. "Don't you ever cut me off and then keep my car-keys you damnfrog!"
Who had he cut off lately? Oh, all kinds of people. A night when he didn't have to cut someone off was a rare night, indeed. But cut off and car-keys kept on the board behind the bar? Only one of those just lately.
Only one.
"You motherfucker," The Mellow Tiger's owner and operator said in a soft, reflective voice. "You stupid crazy motherfucking sonofabitch."
He thought about going back inside to get his deer rifle and then thought better of it. The Tiger was just up the road, and he kept a rather special box under the bar. Inside it was a doublebarrelled Winchester shotgun sawed off at the knees. He'd kept it there ever since that numb f**k Ace Merrill had tried to rob him a few years back.
It was a highly illegal weapon, and Henry had never used it.
He thought he might just use it today.
He touched the ugly scratch Hugh had laid into the side of his T-Bird, then crumpled up the note and tossed it aside. Billy Tupper would be up at the Tiger by now, sweeping the floor and swamping out the heads. Henry would get the sawed-off, then borrow Billy's Pontiac.
It seemed he had a little ass**le-hunting to do.
Henry kicked the balled-up note into the grass. "You been taking those stupid-pills again, Hugh, but you aren't going to be taking any more after today-I guarantee it." He touched the scratch a final time.
He had never been so angry in his whole life. "I guaranfuckin-tee it."
Henry set off up the road toward The Mellow Tiger, walking fast.
2
In the process of tearing apart George T. Nelson's bedroom, Frank jewett found half an ounce of coke under the mattress of the double bed. He flushed it down the john, and as he watched it swirl away, he felt a sudden cramp in his belly. He started to unbuckle his pants, then walked back into the trashed bedroom again instead.
Frank supposed he had gone utterly crazy, but he no longer cared much. Crazy people didn't have to think about the future. To crazy people, the future was a very low priority.