Shadowfires

He had close-cut dark hair, sun-weathered skin, and solid features that looked as if they had been jackhammered out of granite. His intense blue eyes were the same shade as those of the girl in the bed but clearer, direct, piercing. When he turned those eyes briefly toward Jerry Peake, Peake wanted to crawl under a bed and hide. The Stone was compact and powerful, and though he was really smaller than Sharp, he appeared infinitely stronger, more formidable, as if he actually weighed every ounce as much as Sharp but had compressed his tissues into an unnatural density.

“Please leave the room and wait for me in the hall,” said The Stone quietly.

Astonished, Sharp took a couple of steps toward him, loomed over him, and said, “I asked you who the hell you are.”

The Stone's hands and wrists were much too large for the rest of him: long, thick fingers; big knuckles; every tendon and vein and sinew stood out sharply, as if they were hands carved in marble by a sculptor with an exaggerated appreciation for detail. Peake sensed that they were not quite the hands that The Stone had been born with, that they had grown larger and stronger in response to day after day of long, hard, manual labor. The Stone looked as if he thrived on the kind of heavy work that was done in a foundry or quarry or, considering his sun- darkened skin, a farm. But not one of those big, easy, modern farms with a thousand machines and an abundant supply of cheap field hands. No, if he had a farm, he had started it with little money, with bad rocky land, and he had endured lousy weather and sundry catastrophes to bring fruit from the reluctant earth, building a successful enterprise by the expenditure of much sweat, blood, time, hopes, and dreams, because the strength of all those successfully waged struggles was in his face and hands.

“I'm her father, Felsen Kiel,” The Stone told Sharp.

In a small voice devoid of fear and filled with wonder, Sarah Kiel said, “Daddy…”

The Stone started past Sharp, toward his daughter, who had sat up in bed and held out a hand toward him.

Sharp stepped in his way, leaned close to him, loomed over him, and said, “You can see her when we've finished the interrogation.”

The Stone looked up at Sharp with a placid expression that was the essence of equanimity and imperturbability, and Peake was not only gladdened but thrilled to see that Sharp was not going to intimidate this man. “Interrogate? What right have you to interrogate?”

Sharp withdrew his wallet from his jacket, opened it to his DSA credentials. “I'm a federal agent, and I am in the middle of an urgent investigation concerning a matter of national security. Your daughter has information that I've got to obtain as soon as possible, and she is being less than cooperative.”

“If you'll step into the hall,” The Stone said quietly, “I'll speak with her. I'm sure she isn't obstructin' you on purpose. She's a troubled girl, yes, and she's allowed herself to be misguided, but she's never been bad at heart or spiteful. I'll speak to her, find out what you need to know, then convey the information to you.”

“No,” Sharp said. “You'll go into the hall and wait.”

“Please move out of my way,” The Stone said.

“Listen, mister,” Sharp said, moving right up against The Stone, glaring down at him, “if you want trouble from me, you'll get it, more than you can deal with. You obstruct a federal agent, and you're just about giving him a license to come down on you as hard as he wants.”

Having read the name on the DSA credentials, The Stone said, “Mr. Sharp, last night I was awakened by a call from a Mrs. Leben, who said my daughter needed me. That's a message I've been waitin' a long time to hear. It's the growin' season, a busy time—”

The guy was a farmer, by God, which gave Peake new confidence in his powers of observation. In spit-polished city shoes, polyester pants, and starched white shirt, The Stone had the uncomfortable look specific to a simple country man who has been forced by circumstances to exchange his work clothes for unfamiliar duds.

“—a very busy season. But I got dressed the moment I hung up the phone, drove the pickup a hundred miles to Kansas City in the heart of the night, got the dawn flight out to Los Angeles, then the connector flight here to Palm Springs, a taxi—”

“Your travel journal doesn't interest me one damn bit,” Sharp said, still blocking The Stone.

“Mr. Sharp, I am plain bone-weary, which is the fact I'm tryin' to impress upon you, and I am most eager to see my girl, and from the looks of her she's been cryin', which upsets me mightily. Now, though I'm not an angry man by nature, or a trouble-makin' man, I don't know quite what I might do if you keep treatin' me high-handed and try to stop me from seein' what my girl's cryin' about.”

Sharp's face tightened with anger. He stepped back far enough to give himself room to plant one big hand on The Stone's chest.

Peake was not sure whether Sharp intended to guide the man out of the room and into the corridor or give him one hell of a shove back against the wall. He never found out which it was because The Stone put his own hand on Sharp's wrist and bore down and, without seeming to make any effort whatsoever, he removed Sharp's hand from his chest. In fact, he must have put as much painful pressure on Sharp's wrist as Sharp had applied to Sarah's fingers, for the deputy director went pale, the redness of anger draining right out of him, and a queer look passed through his eyes.

Letting go of Sharp's hand, The Stone said, “I know you're a federal agent, and I have the greatest respect for the law. I know you can see this as obstruction, which would give you a good excuse to knock me on my can and clap me in handcuffs. But I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't do you or your agency the least bit of good if you roughed me up, 'specially since I've told you I'll encourage my daughter to cooperate. What do you think?”

Peake wanted to applaud. He didn't.

Sharp stood there, breathing heavily, trembling, and gradually his rage-clouded eyes cleared, and he shook himself the way a bull sometimes will shake itself back to its senses after unsuccessfully charging a matador's cape. “Okay. I just want to get my information fast. I don't care how. Maybe you'll get it faster than I can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sharp. Give me half an hour—”

“Five minutes!” Sharp said.

“Well, sir,” The Stone said quietly, “you've got to give me time to say hello to my daughter, time to hug her. I haven't seen her in almost eighteen months. And I need time to get the whole story from her, to find out what sort of trouble she's in. That's got to come first, 'fore I start throwin' questions at her.”

“Half an hour's too damn long,” Sharp said. “We're in pursuit of a man, a dangerous man, and we—”

“If I was to call an attorney to advise my daughter, which is her right as a citizen, it'd take him hours to get here—”

“Half an hour,” Sharp told The Stone, “and not one damn minute more. I'll be in the hall.”

Previously, Peake had discovered that the deputy director was a sadist and a pedophile, which was an important thing to know. Now he had made another discovery about Sharp: The son of a bitch was, at heart, a coward; he might shoot you in the back or sneak up on you and slit your throat, yes, those things seemed within his character, but in a face-to-face confrontation, he would chicken out if the stakes got high enough. And that was an even more important thing to know.

Peake stood for a moment, unable to move, as Sharp went to the door. He could not take his eyes off The Stone.

“Peake!” Sharp said as he pulled the door open.

Finally Peake followed, but he kept glancing back at Felsen Kiel, The Stone. Now there, by God, was a legend.

20 COPS ON SICK LEAVE

Detective Reese Hagerstrom went to bed at four o'clock Tuesday morning, after returning from Mrs. Leben's house in Placentia, and he woke at ten-thirty, unrested because the night had been full of terrible dreams. Glassy- eyed dead bodies in trash dumpsters. Dead women nailed to walls. Many of the nightmares had involved Janet, the