where the hell Josiah was. Waiting on him.
Ideas tumbled through his mind, endless options. He could walk right up and knock on the door, call this son of a bitch outside. Could pick up one of the large loose stones from the ditch and use it to bash the windshield in. Could sneak home and get his shotgun. One way or another, he’d get this asshole out and answering questions.
That should have been his desire, at least. Find out who this was and what in the hell he was doing following Josiah. Funny thing was, Josiah was having trouble bringing himself to care. Those questions he should be asking, they didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was the fact that someone was here watching his home. The hell with answers—Josiah wanted punishment. Wanted to crawl under the car, puncture the gas tank, set the thing on fire. Watch it blow this nameless son of a bitch sky high in a cloud of orange flame, teach him there were people to be fooled with and people not to be fooled with, and Josiah Bradford was absolutely of the latter set.
He dropped his hand into his pocket at the thought and wrapped his fingers around his cigarette lighter, actually tempted for a minute. But no, those answers were important, and if he blew up the van before the questions had been asked, he would surely regret it. So the dilemma was how to get the man inside the van out of it and willing to talk. Well, the cigarette lighter might help with that after all.
He pulled off his T-shirt and felt around the bottom edge of it until he found one of its holes. Worked his fingers in and tugged and then the cheap cotton tore, the sound loud. He went slower, quieter, tearing again and again until he had five separate strips of fabric. When he had the shirt torn up, he crammed the strips into his pockets, patted around the ditch with his hands until he found a large stone—felt like the broken-off corner of a cinder block—and then dropped to his belly, the weeds and gravel tearing at his skin as he crawled up onto the road and toward the van.
Slow, patient going, stopping occasionally to catch his breath and adjust his position. The ditch on the other side of the road was deeper, and it came to an end right where the van was parked, had a steel culvert that ran from one end of the dirt farm lane to the other. It was packed with dry leaves. Josiah waited for a moment, hearing nothing, and then he slid right under the van.
He left the cinder-block chunk behind, pushed across the gravel on his stomach until he was beneath the front of the van, and put his hand back in his pocket and took out the strips of T-shirt and the lighter. Then he sparked the lighter’s wheel and got the flame going and held it to the end of one strip of cloth and then another. When he had them both going, he reached out and tossed them down into the ditch, which was filled with leaves and grass and was dry from days of sun and wind. Wouldn’t do anything but burn itself out, but all it had to do was burn.
He had a third strip of shirt out, ready to light another, but the fire had already caught some fuel down in the ditch, so he dropped the cloth and slid backward, under the van again.
It was a good thing he’d moved when he did, because the man in the van spotted the fire when it was still in its infancy. Josiah heard a murmuring from inside and then the door slid open and someone stepped out, said, “What in the hell?” under his breath, and then walked down into the ditch and began stomping at the fire. When he did, Josiah slid out from under the van on the other side, screened from view, and crawled around to the back, kneeling and grabbing the chunk of cinder block.
He stood up just as he came around the back, maybe ten feet from the man, who was still stomping at the grass, the fire already gone. Josiah was intending to just bounce the chunk of stone in his hand and tell this boy it was time to talk. When he came around the van, though, he saw that the man had a gun in his hand, thought,
The guy was fast, got turned and had the gun half lifted before the stone caught him flush on the side of the head, caught him with an impact that jarred Josiah’s shoulder and made a wet crunch in the silent night, and his knees buckled and he was down in the ditch with dark blood dripping into the grass and his gun loose at his side. It was over then, over, and Josiah knew it, but for some reason he jumped down there and hit him again, even harder this time, and the sound the stone made on the man’s skull was terrible, a hard-to-soft shattering.
For a moment Josiah stayed where he was, crouched above the guy, who hadn’t so much as twitched. Then he reached down and put his fingertips on the man’s chin and turned his head to the side, and even in the shadows what he saw made him hiss in a breath between his teeth. He took his lighter from his pocket and flicked the wheel and lowered the flame toward the man’s head and said, “Oh, shit, Josiah, oh, shit,” and then he snapped the lighter off because he didn’t want to look anymore.
30
ERIC SLEPT SOON AFTER drinking Anne McKinney’s water. Slept deep and restful, stretched out on his back on top of the covers. When he woke, his first thought was one of relief, an immediate recognition that the terrible pain was past, that he was whole again.
It was cold in the room—he’d cranked up the air in an effort to combat the fever sweats—and he’d been above the covers and below the air vent. Too cold for sleep.
He swung his feet to the floor and sat on the bed for a moment, breathing deep and testing his physical sensations, looking for a chink in the armor. Nothing. His throat was a little raw, his lips dry, but other than that, he felt almost normal.
Over on the table, the Bradford bottle still glowed, though the glow seemed fainter to him, almost like a reflection from some light source he couldn’t see. He got to his feet and went to the thermostat and turned the temperature up, then reached down and touched his toes and stretched his arms above his head, feeling liberation at the ability to move without pain.
The heavy curtains had been pulled to block out any trace of the lights that fueled his headaches, but now he crossed the room and shoved them back, looked down on the rotunda below. Beautiful. At night the massive pendulum that hung from the center of the dome was equipped with colored lights that shifted every few seconds. He unlocked the door to the balcony and stepped out, braced his hands on the railing, and looked down.
Empty and still. No one in the atrium or out on one of the other balconies. It was his world right now, his alone.
He knew he should go back to bed, that his body would demand plenty of sleep after the gauntlet he’d just run it through, but he didn’t want to. Instead, he propped the door open and dragged the desk chair out onto the balcony, sat and put his feet up on the railing, and watched the colors change on that incredible ceiling. Purple, green, red, purple, green, red, purple, green…
The colors faded on him then, shifting to darkness broken by small points of white light, and then the ceiling and the hotel were gone and he was someplace else entirely.
It was a cloudless night, the sky a splendor of stars, and beneath a gleaming half-moon stood a shack that appeared unmeant for habitation. There were torn strips of cloth plugging holes in the shingles, and the front door was separated from its frame at the bottom, hanging from just the top hinge. Of the three windows in the front of the house only two panes of glass remained. Beyond the house was a tilting shed and an outhouse with no door.
Somewhere in the dark, soft but sweet, a violin played. There was no living thing in sight, neither man nor creature, just that sad, shivering song.
Another sound soon caught the violin and overran it, the strong purring of an engine, and headlights lit the filthy gray front of the house as a roadster with wide running boards appeared and pulled right up to the sagging edge of the front porch. The door to the shed banged open and a man stepped out and peered at the car. He was tall but stooped, a bare chest showing under his open shirt, tangled gray hair hanging down over his ears and along his neck. He had a cigar pinched in one corner of his mouth.
“That you, Campbell?” he hollered, squinting and shielding his eyes.
“You get many other visitors?” came the chill-voiced reply.
The old man grumbled and stepped farther out from the shed as Campbell Bradford advanced, pushing his bowler hat up on top of his head. He’d left the car running and its headlights on, and the light came up from behind him and spread his shadow large across the front of the shed.
“You’s late,” the old man muttered, but he extended his hand, friendly.
Campbell didn’t move his own hands from his pockets.
