It was then that he noticed what had been left on his desk: a gun, a badge, an ID card, and one sentence on a sheet of yellow legal paper:
'I cannot serve both God and mammon.'
It was signed by Jud and dated yesterday.
Robert stormed out of his office, clutching the note in his hand. 'What is this shit?' He strode over to Lee Anne desk, waved the paper at her. 'Did you see him do this?' She looked up at him, confused.
'Who?'
'Jud.' He dropped the note on her desk, watching as she read it. 'Did he talk to you about this?'
'No,' she said. 'Stu?' He turned toward the other officer. 'Were you here when Jud put this on my desk?'
Stu shook his head. ' 'Shit.' Robert reached down, grabbed Lee Anne phone, and dialed Jud's number. The line was busy, and he slammed the receiver in its cradle. 'Get him for me,' he ordered the secretary.
'Keep trying until he answers and patch him through. I want to talk to him.'
'Yes, sir.' Robert strode angrily back to his office, telling himself to calm down, not to overreact. He walked over to the window, stared out at the highway, trying to figure out why Jud would just quit like this without first talking to him. The two of them had been friends for years, since they'd both been patrolmen, and they'd never, to Robert's knowledge, had a serious falling out. Even if he made up his mind to quit, Jud still should have talked to him.
What the hell was he going to do with one less man and all this crap going down?
Robert glanced toward the fax machine, grateful for once for its presence. The machine, until now an annoyance and a reminder of the FBI's unwanted interference, suddenly represented a link with the outside world, an anchor to reason and reality.
He needed that right now.
He looked out the window again, noticed how few cars were on the highway. Complaints about the church had tapered off the past two days. Complaints about every thing had tapered off. He didn't like that. It wasn't natural. There were bound to be fights somewhere in town, noisy neighbors, illegally parked cars blocking driveways.
Something. But here at the station, normally command central for all town trouble, it seemed as if Rio Verde was deserted. No phones rang; no people came in.
Lee Anne had noticed it too, he knew. As had Stu. Both of them were less talkative than usual, jumpier, more on edge. Stu was on desk duty and was catching up with his paperwork, but there was a strange, almost desperate quality to his typing, Robert thought. Lee Anne had spent half the morning staring at a single article in People magazine.
He was not feeling so hot himself. Last night, he had been awakened long after midnight by the sound of low laughing, a sound that grew quickly in power and volume. He had recognized the distinctive tone and pitch of the laughter and had immediately pulled open his bedroom shades, and he'd seen, standing out in the desert in the moonlight, beneath the thin leafless branches of a palo verde tree, what he was afraid he would see. The Laughing Man.
The figure disappeared the second he laid eyes on it, fading back into the blackness, the laughter dissipating into the sound of a light breeze, but the feeling that the Laughing Man was still out there, watching the house- waitingnmade Robert unable to fall back asleep, and he spent the rest of the night watching old Westerns on TNT, his loaded pistol and a clip of extra ammunition on the end table next to him.
Tonight he was going to have two officers stake out the house, armed with guns and jade, holy water and crucifixes. Maybe then he would be able to get some sleep.
The phone rang, an inside call. He hurried over to his desk, picked up the receiver. 'Yes?'
It was Lee Anne 'Jud's line isn't busy anymore, but he's not answering. Do you want me to keep trying?'
'Keep trying until you get him.'
'Gotcha.'
Robert hung up the phone. He sat down in his chair, picked up Jud's badge, hefted it in his hand, then threw it against the wall, where it hit with a disconcertingly tiny thump.
Rich stopped by at lunch to deliver copies of the newspaper, laying a stack on the front counter next to the March of Dimes donation can, and bringing one back to Robert's office. He dropped the paper on the desk and pointed to Sue's story beneath the fold on the front page, to the two-deck headline 'Vampires Can Be Killed, Chinese Experts Say.'
Robert smiled wanly. 'Chinese experts?'
'People believe authority. And I think Sue's grandma qualifies.'
'So when do we get to meet this old woman? We're sup posed to be following her lead, taking her word as gospel, and we've never even met her. I don't feel right placing my trust in someone I don't know. It doesn't sit well with me.'
'I thought we could go over to the restaurant for lunch, meet her now.
I have some things I want to talk to her about, too.'
'Now?' Robert shook his head. 'I have to wait for Joe
Cash from the state police to call.'
'About what?'
'Pare Frye. I told him she was kidnapped here in town, in front of her mother, that we found her shoes in a ditch, but the Elvis bit threw him off, and he's insisting that we expand the search statewide.'
'What about the FBI? Do they know?'
'They know and they don't care.'
Rich shrugged. 'I don't suppose we can talk to them about vampires, can we?'
'I'm not bringing it up.'
Rich sat down in the chair in front of his brother's desk, turning his body sideways and draping his legs over the chair arms. 'We'll have a late lunch, then. We'll go after he calls. Sue said they'd be there all afternoon.' 'The old lady knows we're coming?' 'I guess.'
Robert leaned back in his chair, tapped a pencil on his knee. 'I was thinking. Maybe Wheeler's on to something.
Maybe this is the Second Coming.'
'What is this horse shit?'
'Things are supposed to get bad before Jesus returns. Read your Revelations.'
'Come on. You're no churchgoer and neither am I.' Robert shifted uncomfortably in his seat. 'I'm not saying I believe it. But one of my officers pointed it out to me the other day. He goes to Wheeler's church.'
'Jesus--'
'Exactly.'
Rich looked at his brother and both of them laughed, the spell broken.
'Okay, I don't believe it,' Robert admitted. 'But I can't help thinking that these two things are connected, the vampire and Wheeler's Second Coming. Who knows?
Maybe Wheeler does know something we don't.' 'Shit.'
'People are seeing dead rock stars and dead child molesters and vampires. That's not the normal course of events.'
'Wheeler doesn't know his ass from a porkpie hal Even though I don't go to church, I think there is something after we die. Some sort of afterlife. But I don't think it can be understood by us. And the idea that the nature of God can be fully understood by a semiliterate Neanderthal like Wheeler... I just don't buy it.'
'Oh, but you think your part-time employee's grandma does possess the secrets of the universe.'
'What is it with you? What do you have against Sue?' 'Nothing.'
'It doesn't seem that way to me.'
'That's just because you want to pork her.'
[ Rich swung his legs off the chair and stood. 'I don't have to listen to this.'
'Oh, get off your high horse. Can't you even take a joke?'
'That wasn't a joke.' 'Okay, I'm sorry.' 'Yeah. Right.'
Robert stared at his brother for a moment, then nervously cleared his throat. 'I heard laughing last night, Rich.' Rich glanced toward the window, not responding. 'I heard the Laughing Man.'
