“Okay. I’ll turn them off.”
“Do you know how to use an automatic?” Jesse Ray asks.
“No.”
“Have you ever fired a gun before?”
“No.”
Pause. “Well, Celeste has.”
Before she can respond there comes a knock at the door.
Mary puts down the phone, runs across the living room, her heart hammering in her chest, hardly believing that Celeste will be on the other side, hardly believing that her friends, her only friends, have come to help her, hardly believing that this nightmare is about to come to an end.
She opens the door. It is not Celeste.
It is Jean Luc. In his right hand is Celeste’s hat, along with a bloody silver earring, shaped like an icicle. In his left hand, a gun.
Jean Luc points the gun at Mary’s forehead, eases back the hammer, and says: “You shouldn’t have called them.”
65
Carla Davis rushes across the icy parking lot at the Cleveland Heights city hall. Bobby Dietricht has gone to Jeremiah Cross’s address on Powell Road. Greg is on his way to the Cain Manor apartments. It is Carla’s job to reach out to the Cleveland Heights PD before they begin banging on doors. Even though time is incredibly tight, it is absolutely necessary.
In the lobby of the Cleveland Heights city hall Carla sees two grimfaced men chatting by the elevators; one weaselly and rail thin; the other portly, pockmarked. Carla recognizes the older, heavier of the men as Denny Sanchez, a Cleveland Heights detective.
She takes out her badge, and all three cops exhibit the usual camaraderie, tempered by the usual rivalry.
“What can we do for the city?” Sanchez asks.
Carla explains, in minimal detail, the need for Cleveland Heights assistance.
Sanchez buys half the loaf, says: “I think the chief will want a little bit more.”
Carla glances at her watch. A little bit more puts Paris in the middle. “That’s classified for the time being.”
“Then so are the Cain Manor apartments,” Sanchez says. “Just give me a name. I won’t take it.”
Carla hesitates for a moment. “Cross.”
The skinny cop barks a laugh.
“Something funny?” Carla says, leaning in, towering over him.
“No,” he says. “No ma’am.”
Sanchez asks: “Is there somewhere we can call you?”
Carla holds the skinny cop’s stare until he looks away, then says, “I can wait right here if you’ve got to talk to someone, Denny.”
“Well, we have to clear this from high on high. You understand. It’s New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake. Let me talk to Chief Blake. I’ll call you right back.”
“Like tonight?”
“Like in ten minutes,” Sanchez says.
Carla flips him a card, holds up her phone. “Ten minutes.”
66
An unknown room. Beyond dark. Black walls, ceiling, floor. A large round object in front of him, like a kettle or an old gas grill. He is surrounded by candles, but the light is instantly devoured by the gloom, immediately digested into the air, thick with death. Thumping music comes from somewhere.
He had traveled, definitely. He had been in a car. He looks at the object on his lap.
It is a gun. His gun.
The smell is coming from the huge bowl in front of him. He leans forward and, as he does, in the scant light, he sees the putrefacted flesh, the blackened organs, the shimmer of a thousand maggots, fat with marrow. He bolts to the corner of the room and, like the inevitability of vomit itself, gives in to the nausea and retches on the floor, near the corner. His vision vibrates with colors around the edges.
He wipes his mouth, tries to steady himself, a deep paranoia rummaging inside him. He hallucinates wildly, thoughts and sounds and emotions whirling. He finds the chair, pulls it back to the wall, sits heavily.
One minute of black silence passes, then:
“Son?”
Paris raises his head. He sees a chair on the other side of the big kettle. A figure is sitting on it. Sitting? No. More like floating just an inch or so off the surface, a weightless, matterless being.
It is Frank Paris.
“Dad?”
The figure on the chair shimmers, disappears, returns, like a pixilated image coming and going from clear focus. His father is robust and healthy again. His hands look huge and nicked and dad-grimy.
For some reason, the sight of his father, dead these many years, does not scare him. What scares him is his father’s scrutiny. After all this time his father can now assess him as a full-grown man, instantly, as he might a too-young doctor holding onto a clipboard that would chronicle the end of his life.
Jack Paris wonders: Am I tall enough? Am I smart enough? Am I man enough?
Am I father enough?
Frank Paris will say no to that one. No, son, you are not father enough. You couldn’t make your marriage work, and you will never be father enough to my granddaughter.
Shimmer.
His father is suddenly thinner, young-old again, his face is drawn downward in a sallow avalanche of skin. In his hands, a battered Etch-A-Sketch.
Happy Birthday, Daddy!
“Do a trick for me, Jackie,” his father says.
“What, Dad?”
Silence.
You’ve got to know what breaks his heart.
“Dad?”
Again, silence. The definition of empty.
His father is gone.
Then, suddenly, all the lights of hell explode in Jack Paris’s eyes.
67
At first, to the 617 people tuned to Cable99 on New Year’s Eve, it looks to be a scaled-down version of Hollywood Squares. Or The Brady Bunch. Four windows dividing the TV screen into four equal sections.
Closer examination, to those in the know, would yield the understanding that these are four separate webcam feeds, the sort of cybercast videos that jump and lurch and produce, overall, a rather vertiginous effect in
