housepainter could have deduced all this
Consequently, there must be other wild cards that the doctor himself had not stacked in the deck, that had been dealt by fate.
One of them would be Skeet. Skeet, with a brain so addled by drugs that he hadn’t been entirely programmable.
Concerned about the apprentice painter’s reliability, Ahriman had come here this evening expressly to establish a suicide scenario in Skeet’s sub-subconscious and then send the wasted wretch toddling off to self- destruct before dawn. Now he would need a new strategy.
What other wild cards in addition to Skeet? Unquestionably, others had been played. However much Dusty and Martie knew — and their knowledge might not be quite as complete as it seemed — they had not put together a major portion of the puzzle with just the book and Skeet.
This unexpected development didn’t appeal to Ahriman’s sporting spirit. He enjoyed some risk in his games, but only manageable risk.
He was a gamester, not a gambler. He preferred the architecture of rules to the jungle of luck.
61
The trailer park huddled defensively in the high wind as though anticipating one of the tornadoes that always found such places and scattered them across blasted landscapes for the wicked delectation of television cameras. Fortunately, twisters were rare, weak, and short-lived in California. The residents of this park would not have to endure the practiced compassion of reporters torn between thrilling to a big story of destruction and admitting to what drams of human empathy had survived their years in service of the evening news.
The streets were laid out in a grid, one exactly like the next. The hundreds of mobile homes on concrete- block foundations were more alike than not.
Nevertheless, Dusty had no difficulty recognizing Foster “Fig” Newton’s place when he saw it. This community was wired for cable television, and Fig’s was the only trailer with a small satellite dish on its roof.
Actually, three satellite receivers were mounted on Fig’s roof, silhouetted against the low night sky that was painted a sour yellow-black by the upwash of the suburban light pollution. Each dish was a different size from the others. One was aimed toward the southern heavens, one toward the northern; both were stationary. The third, mounted on a complex gimbal joint, tilted and swiveled ceaselessly, as if plucking tasty bits of elusive data from the ether in much the way that a nighthawk snatches flying insects out of the air.
In addition to the satellite dishes, exotic antennae prick-led from the roof: four-and five-foot spikes, each featuring a different number of stubby crossbars; a double helix of copper ribbons; an item resembling an inverted, denuded metal Christmas tree standing on its point, with all branch ends aimed toward the sky; and something else like a horned Viking helmet balanced on a six-foot pole.
Bristling with these data-gathering devices, the trailer might have been a spaceworthy extraterrestrial ship crudely disguised as a mobile home: the sort of thing that callers were always reporting on the talk-radio programs that Fig favored.
Dusty, Martie, Skeet, and Valet gathered on an eight-foot-square porch covered by an aluminum awning that might, after takeoff, deploy as a solar sail. Dusty knocked on the door when he couldn’t find a bell push.
Clutching his blanket-cloak, which flapped and billowed in the wind, Skeet resembled a figure from a fantasy novel, following the trail of a fugitive sorcerer, exhausted by adventure, long harried by goblins. Raising his voice to compete with the wind, he said, “Are you really certain Claudette’s not sick?”
“We’re certain. She’s not,” Martie assured him.
Turning to Dusty, the kid said, “But you told me she was sick.”
“It was a lie, something to get you out of the clinic.”
Disappointed, Skeet said, “I truly thought she was sick.”
“You wouldn’t really want her to be ill,” Martie said.
“Not dying, necessarily. Cramps and puking would be enough.”
The porch light came on.
“And bad diarrhea,” Skeet amended.
Dusty had a sense of being studied through the fish-eye lens in the door.
After a moment, the door opened. Standing on the threshold, Fig blinked behind his thick spectacles. His gray eyes were made huge by the magnifying lenses, brimming with the sorrow that never left them even when Fig laughed. “Hey.”
“Fig,” Dusty said, “I’m sorry to bother you at home, and this late, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Sure,” Fig said, stepping back to let them in.
“Do you mind the dog?” Dusty asked.
“No.”
Martie led Skeet up the steps. Valet and Dusty followed.
As Fig shut the door, Dusty said, “We’ve got big trouble, Fig. I might have gone to Ned, but he’d probably strangle Skeet sooner or later, so I—”
“Sit?” Fig asked, leading them to a dinette table.
As the three of them accepted the invitation, pulling chairs up to the table, and as the dog crawled under it, Martie said, “We might’ve gone to my mother, too, but she would just—”
“Juice?” Fig asked.
“Juice?” Dusty echoed.
“Orange, prune, or grape,” Fig elaborated.
“Do you have any coffee?” Dusty asked.
“Nope.”
“Orange,” Dusty decided. “Thanks.”
“Grape would be nice,” Martie said.
“You have any vanilla Yoo-hoo?” Skeet asked.
“Nope.”
“Grape.”
Fig went to the refrigerator in the adjoining kitchen.
On the radio, as Fig poured the juice, people were talking about “active and inactive alien DNA grafted to the human genetic structure” and worrying about “whether the purpose of current Earth colonization by aliens is enslavement of the human race, elevation of the human race to a higher condition, or the simple harvesting of human organs to make sweetbreads for extraterrestrial dinner tables.”
Martie raised her eyebrows as if to ask Dusty,
Surveying the trailer, nodding, smiling, Skeet said, “I like this place. It’s got a nice hum.”
After Nurse Hernandez was sent home with a promise of a full night’s pay for two hours less work than she had been contracted to provide, after Nurse Ganguss was repeatedly assured that there was nothing their movie- star patient required at the moment, and after Nurse Woosten found a few new excuses to display the gymnastic abilities of her sprightly pink tongue, Dr. Ahriman returned to his unfinished business in room 246.
The actor was in bed, where he’d been told to wait, lying atop the covers in his black bikini briefs. He stared at the ceiling with as much emotion as he had brought to any of the roles in his string of colossal hit pictures.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, the doctor said, “Tell me where you are now, not physically but mentally.”
“I’m in the chapel.”
“Good.”
During a previous visit, Ahriman had instructed the actor never again to use heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or other illegal substances. Contrary to what the doctor had told Nurses Ganguss and Woosten, this man was now effectively cured of all drug addictions.
Neither compassion nor a sense of professional responsibility had motivated Dr. Ahriman to free the patient
