Phantoms

“Just plain Doc.”

“Doc?” He thought about it, and a slow smile spread over his face. “Doc. It makes you think of one of those grizzled, cantankerous old coots that Barry Fitzgerald used to play in the movies, way back in the thirties and forties.”

“Sorry I'm not grizzled.”

“That's okay. You're not an old coot, either.”

She laughed softly.

“I like the irony of it,” Whitman said, “Doc. Yeah, and when I think of you jamming that revolver in Gene Teer's belly, it fits.”

They loaded two more guns.

“Tal, why all these weapons for a little substation in a town like Snowfield?”

“If you want to get state and federal matching funds for the county law enforcement budget, you've got to meet their requirements for all sorts of ridiculous things. One of the specifications is for minimal arsenals in substations like this. Now… well… maybe we should be glad we've got all this hardware.”

“Except so far we haven't seen anything to shoot at.”

“I suspect we will,” Tal said, “And I'll tell you something.”

“What's that?”

His broad, dark, handsome face could look unsettlingly. “I don't think you'll have to worry about having to shoot other people. Somehow, I don't believe it's people we have to worry about.”

Bryce dialed the private, unlisted number at the governor's residence in Sacramento. He talked to a maid who insisted the governor couldn't come to the phone, not even to take a life and-death call from an old friend. She wanted Bryce to leave a message. Then he talked to the chief of the household staff, who also wanted him to leave a message. Then, after being put on hold, he talked to Gary Poe, Governor Jack Retlock's chief political aide and advisor.

“Bryce,” Gary said, “Jack just can't come to the phone right now. There's an important dinner underway here. The Japanese trade minister and the consul general from San Francisco.”

“Gary—”

“We're trying damned hard to get that new Japanese-American electronics plant for California, and we're afraid it's going to go to Texas or Arizona or maybe even New York. Jesus, New York!”

“Gary”

“Why would they even consider New York, with all the labor problems and the tax rates what they are back there? Sometimes I think”

“Gary, shut up.”

“Huh?”

Bryce never snapped at anyone. Even Gary Poe — who could talk faster and louder than a carnival barker — was shocked into silence.

“Gary, this is an emergency. Get Jack for me.”

Sounding hurt, Poe said, “Bryce, I'm authorized to”

“I've got a hell of a lot to do in the next hour or two, Gary. If I live long enough to do it, that is. I can't spend fifteen minutes laying this whole thing out for you and then another fifteen laying it out again for Jack. Listen, I'm in Snowfield. It appears as if everyone who lived here is dead, Gary.”

“What?”

“Five hundred people.”

“Bryce, if this is some sort of joke or”

“Five hundred dead. And that's the least of it. Now will you for Christ's sake get Jack?”

“But Bryce, five hundred”

“Get Jack, damn it!”

Poe hesitated, then said, “Old buddy, this better be the straight shit.” He dropped the phone and went for the governor.

Bryce had known Jack Retlock for seventeen years. When he joined the Los Angeles police, he had been assigned to lack for his rookie year. At that time, Jack was a seven-year veteran of the force, a seasoned hand.

Indeed, Jack had seemed so streetwise that Bryce had despaired of ever being even half as good at the job. In a year, however, he was better. They voted to stay together, partners. But eighteen months later, fed up with a legal system that regularly turned loose the punks he worked so hard to imprison, Jack quit police work and went into politics. As a cop, he'd collected a fistful of citations for bravery. He parlayed his hero image into a seat on the L A. city council, then ran for mayor, winning in a landslide. From there, he'd jumped into the governor's chair. It was a far more impressive career than Bryce's own halting progress to the sheriff's post in Santa Mira, but Jack always was the more aggressive of the two.

“Doody? Is that you?” Jack asked, picking up the phone in Sacramento. Doody was his nickname for Bryce. He'd always said that Bryce's sandy hair, freckles, wholesome face, and marionette eyes made him look like Howdy Doody.

“It's me, Jack.”

“Gary's raving some lunatic nonsense”

“It's true,” Bryce said.

He told Jack all about Snowfield.

After listening to the entire story, Jack took a deep breath and said, “I wish you were a drinking man, Doody.”

“This isn't booze talking, Jack. Listen, the first thing I want is-”

“National Guard?”

“No!” Bryce said, “That's exactly what I want to avoid as long as we have any choice.”

“If I don't use the Guard and every agency at my disposal, and then if it later turns out I should've sent them in first thing, my ass will be grass, and there'll be a herd of hungry cows all around me.”

“Jack, I'm counting on you to make the right decisions, not just the right political decisions. Until we know more about the situation, we don't want hordes of Guardsmen tramping around up here. They're great for helping out in a flood, a postal strike, that sort of thing. But they're not full-time military men. They're salesmen and attorneys and carpenters and schoolteachers. This calls for a tightly controlled, efficient little police action, and that sort of thing can be conducted only by real cops, full-time cops.”

“And if your men can't handle it?”

“Then I'll be the first to yell for the Guard.”

Finally Retlock said, “Okay. No Guardsmen. For now.”

Bryce sighed. “And I want to keep the State Health Department out of here, too.”

“Doody, be reasonable. How can I do that? If there's any chance that a contagious disease has wiped out Snowfieldor some kind of environmental poisoning—”

“Listen, Jack, Health does a fine job when it comes to tracking down and controlling vectors for outbreaks of plague or mass food poisoning or water contamination. But essentially, they're bureaucrats; they move slowly. We can't afford to move slowly on this. I have the gut feeling that we're living strictly on borrowed time. All hell could break loose at any time; in fact, I'll be surprised if it doesn't. Besides, the Health Department doesn't have the equipment to handle it, and they don't have a contingency plan to cover the death of an entire town. But there's someone who does, Jack. The Army Medical Corps' CBW Division has a relatively new program they call the Civilian Defense Unit.”

“CBW Division?” Retlock asked. There was a new tension in his voice, “You don't mean the chemical and biological warfare boys?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, you don't think it has anything to do with nerve gas or germ war”

“Probably not,” Bryce said, thinking of the Liebermanns' severed heads, of the creepy feeling that had overcome him inside the covered passageway, of the incredible suddenness with which Jake Johnson had vanished. “But I don't know enough about it to rule out CBW or anything else.”

A hard edge of anger had crystallized in the governor's voice. “If the damned army has been careless with