“We'll be right back,” the talk-show host said, pretending to be shocked at the man's remark.
“Do you have an opinion about today's program?” an announcer's voice asked, as a nine hundred number was scrolled across the television screens. “Call us at 1-900-SPEAK UP. Each call costs fifty cents, and you must be eighteen or older. Let's hear your opinion.'
Daniel flipped the audio off with a remote control. He got up heavily from the sofa where he'd been watching television, wedge between the man and woman of the house. “You two behave yourselves.” He clomped across the carpet, his 15EEEEE feet making nasty squishing sounds as he walked to the telephone and dialed.
He listened for the instructions and gave the telephone number. When he heard the tone he made his recorded message.
“Hello. My name is Bill Stephens,” he said, giving the name of the man who was watching silently from the sofa, “and my wife and I just saw the show with Porkchop and Dasheeka. It just
When his bare feet were nice and wet he walked over to the dining-room table, and with some effort hoisted his butt up onto it. Carefully positioning himself he then made one footprint after another on the wall, lying on his back as he walked up the wallpaper as high as he could.
Mr. and Mrs. William Stephens, of Turdtown. Missouri, eyes taped open and heads duct-taped to the sofa itself, observed their human centerpiece—unseeing—as he left bloody tracks, then sat up with a grunt and began wiping his feet with the wet towels he'd arranged nearby. With that accomplished, he hopped off the table and walked across scattered pieces of clean cardboard to the bathroom.
Tomorrow, the next day, someone would find the three corpses. Whoever or whatever had ripped their hearts out had then apparently walked across the room, up the wall, and dematerialized.
The talk show had put him in a playful mood.
63
By the next day it was business as usual at the doctor's office. The waters were pushing in closer and it seemed there had been a rash of terrible explosions. So far, eleven persons were dead. By coincidence, most of them were members of a local white-supremacy outfit.
Dr. Royal could have canceled his appointments easily. He was semi-retired, and no one would have thought a thing of it. The idea tempted him mightily but it was no time to get lazy. The last thing he wanted was to commit any act that might fit a profile the authorities would surely have by now designed to match up with the actions of their elusive Nazi, as they'd have clumsily put the facts together.
He was full of pain-killer, but still much the worse for his encounter with the Jew bitch. It was all he could do to keep his avuncular smile in place while JoNelle Lanahan ran her ugly mouth about her problems, reassured her about the diet he'd prescribed for her enlarged thyroid, and got the heart attack survivor out of his office. He'd seen one more old patient, Bess Cosgrove, whose crippling arthritis was worsening. He prescribed a special pillow, changed her medicine, and gave her the obligatory pain shot, which would wear off almost immediately. Somehow he made it through the midday. He told his nurse, “I'll probably be back around one, but don't schedule many. I want to quit early today.'
“Sure. Two-thirty all right?'
“Fine,” he said, glancing at his watch. It wasn't even eleven yet. He'd nap for an hour. Eat a bowl of soup. He went out his private office exit, closing the door, checking to make sure it had locked, and turned to see a familiar face waiting there in the parking lot of the clinic.
If Ray Meara hadn't been tired and ill to begin with, he'd have taken a clearer look at the bedside clock and seen that it was not shortly before eleven but more like two minutes before nine, and that his clock had stopped at eleven the night before. Had he started the day armed with this small piece of knowledge he might not have hurried, and he probably wouldn't have ended up stepping off the submerged guardrail of the Mark Road Bridge.
But Meara did hurry, and he did step from a boat directly into a deep ditch filled with ice-cold river water, and he was still in shock, not to mention injured (though unbeknownst to him at the time), when he found the frightening note and book left for him at the motel office. Within minutes he knew that Sharon had never returned from her foolhardy confrontation, that the cops were not about to lock Dr. Royal up for murder, and that Royal and Shtolz were one.
Meara, still on his feet but barely operating, simply refused to grasp the fact that such a note as he held in his hand, together with the missing-persons list that now included Sharon, were insufficient evidence to cause the constabulary to immediately arrest the town's leading citizen as a mass murderer.
He fought back the urge to scream in Jimmie Randall's face. He knew the reaction that would cause. The cops were “concerned,” and Doc would be brought in for “intensive questioning,” but it was “too early” to be sure Sharon Kamen had disappeared, and the words began to form a bullshit cloud, hanging oppressively in the air that Meara was finding more difficult to breathe by the minute. He finally dialed a local lawyer named Stephen Ellis, whom he'd heard was gutsy and aggressive.
In a breathless avalanche of words he sketched it out for Ellis. “I wanna do something. I got to stop this guy. What about a citizen's arrest? Isn't there such a thing?'
“Sure. You can arrest somebody. You arrest Doc Royal, let's say. He gets a lawyer and countersues you for false arrest. Now the jury awards him your farm. That's the way that could work.'
“But he might be getting set to disappear himself. What if he gets away with this shit? I gotta do something. I know he's done something to Sharon and—” He was beside himself. “I gotta
“Okay. I'll be down there as soon as I can. Stay at the motel and wait for me. We'll go to the courthouse and—” on and on. Papers. Warrants. A U.S. marshal would blah blah. The sheriff would do such. He would make bail. You would do this, he would do that. Meara thanked the man and hung up, went outside, and tried to breathe as the bullshit cloud filled the room behind him.
Double pneumonia, both lungs, overpoweringly potent even in its incipiency, ravaged Meara's system, which was already unbalanced by the trauma of the boating accident. Later, he'd learn that as he stepped off the bridge rail, left foot first, the weight of the boat had brought some three to four hundred pounds of steel rushing up to clip him on the spine, then again at the base of the skull, as the tippy boat fought to right itself. The plunge into frigid water had shocked him so totally that he never identified or remembered the two fast blows as he went over the side.
The massive shock of realization that the town's leading citizen, a kindly man he'd known for years, had a monstrous alter ego—this, and Sharon's situation—combined with his physical deterioration to pull him further down.
Once again, a quirk of timing played a part. Had Meara begun his day in a normal fashion, and showed up at Jimmie Randall's office only a short while later, things might have proceeded in a far different way. Twenty-one minutes after Meara left the city administration building to return to Sharon's motel, praying she'd suddenly appear or call, a truck driver found Sharon and called the police, the Bayou City ambulance service, and the Clearwater County sheriff's office. But Ray's timing was bad.
It was a brain-addled, desperate, and violently angry Raymond Meara, both physically and mentally impaired, who stumbled from his pickup in front of the Royal Clinic at 10:43 A.M. He figured it was after noon, and his plan was to wait for the man to return from lunch and arrest him for the murders.
His brain signals were malfunctioning and all he could think of was revenge. Royal must not be permitted to escape. He reached in and unholstered the pistol in the glove compartment, holding it down under the dash as he racked a round into the chamber and thumbed the safety off. Cocked and locked.
He turned, shock, grief, pain, trauma, double pneumonia taking him under, as the man he was after appeared at the side of the building, saying something to him and laughing, and very slowly, as if in a drugged state, every move on slo-mo, he laboriously pulled the weapon from his belt and said to his old friend, saintly Doc Royal, “You're under arrest you son of a bitch,” pointing his firearm at him as he'd been trained to do, the words sounding inside his head as if they'd been pulled through axle grease and molasses.
“
