bending over to snatch his prize from him, Tim rolled away and clutched the weapon tight against his chest, like a football player protecting the ball. Coverley kicked him in the side, again with amazingly painful results, and Tim got the grip in his hand and his finger on the trigger. Roman Richard swarmed over him, roaring like a bull. As if by itself, Tim’s finger tightened on the small, curved bit of metal beneath it.
Then he understood that, in something like contemptuous boredom, WCHWHLLDN had opened Roman Richard’s hand.
His index finger completed the gesture it had begun. The unforgiving object in Tim’s hand flew up with the force of the explosion, and Tim saw that the man he had shot had vanished. Big Roman Richard, who had been immediately before him, looming like a wall equipped with hair-encrusted hands, was no more. From behind him came a high-pitched sound of desperation.
Thinking that the sound came from Willy, Tim got to his knees and spun around. Willy was standing about three feet in front of her duffel, looking down at him with a complicated expression on her face. Giles Coverley had stopped moving. Tim guessed that he had lowered his foot about a second before. The expression on Coverley’s face was not at all difficult to read. He’d had enough, this was over-the-top too much, he surrendered, hoping only for due process and treatment under the Geneva Convention.
“Back up,” Tim said.
Coverley stepped backward. He held up his hands, his palms out. “Look,” he said. “Forget the explanations. What are you going to do now? You can’t call the police, you know. They’re still after her.” His tone made it clear that he blamed Willy for his baffling series of misfortunes.
“No, they’re not,” Tim said, and got to his feet. “In this world, they never were. The bank doesn’t exist, remember?”
“You still can’t use the police. How the devil could you explain what went on here?” Keening slightly, he bent over to look at his left foot, which faded abruptly into invisibility and sent him toppling to the surface of the parking lot. From his mouth flew a great many inventive curses. The lightness feeling made him utter a high-pitched humming sound while his foot flickered in and out of view for a short time. At last, it reappeared without disappearing again, and he slumped, panting, over his belt, his legs stuck out before him.
“Throw him a candy bar,” Tim said.
“Are you kidding?” Willy stepped back toward the duffel bag as though to defend its contents.
“If you don’t, I will. I don’t like seeing people suffer.”
With obvious reluctance, Willy retreated to the bag, knelt down to reach in, and plucked out the foil-wrapped disc of a York peppermint pattie. She threw it at Coverley as if skipping a rock across the surface of a lake, and it skimmed straight into the center of his chest. Coverley disrobed the patty and thrust it into his mouth in a single movement. His face relaxed into momentary ecstasy.
“Do it again,” Tim said.
Willy picked out an Oh Henry! bar and hurled it at Coverley, who caught it with both hands and shucked the wrapper in the second and a half it took him to carry the bar to his mouth.
“I shouldn’t blame him,” Willy said. “He was only doing what you made him do.”
“I have to admit,” said Coverley around a wad of chocolate-peanut mush, “it was pretty difficult to threaten this guy. Basically, all I really wanted to do was work for him instead of Mitchell. But, you know, I had this job. Would you mind if I stood up?”
“Stand up,” Tim said. He glanced at Willy, who, without complaint, bent down and tossed a Mounds bar at Coverley with an underhand pitch.
Coverley took more time with the Mounds bar than he had with the others, turning it into more of a meal. “I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me with you.”
“Sorry,” Tim said.
“I didn’t think so. Tell me this. Where did Roman Richard go?”
“He didn’t go anywhere,” Tim said.
Willy bent down and picked out a candy bar for herself.
“Are you telling me to go off and kill people to get their money?”
“God damn,” Tim said. He took three hundred dollars from his wallet, leaving him with two. “No, I can’t do that. Take this money and live on it until you can get a job. Go to Milwaukee and say you’ll wash dishes.”
Coverley held out his hands like an infant, and Tim placed the bills in their cupped palms. “To tell you the truth,” Coverley said, “we didn’t really kill those people. Roman Richard shot their dog to show them we meant business, but that’s all.”
“Why did you tell me you killed people, then?”
“I wanted to scare you. Well, at that point I would have killed you, that’s true. How about another Oh Henry! Could you manage that?”
“Get out of here,” Tim said, and Coverley dipped the money into his pocket and moved toward the SUV. He would leave it on the street in Milwaukee, and in a day the police would be hearing from its terrified owners.
The rest of the way to Millhaven, Tim sped along a series of roads and highways he had known all his life. Willy went through candy bars at the rate of approximately one every twenty minutes. Tim thought Willy grew more beautiful, more translucent and lit from within, with every mile, and when he considered what lay before them, his heart hurt for her, and for himself, too.
She said, “What happened to Roman Richard, that’s what’s going to happen to me, isn’t it?”
“Let’s hope not,” he said.
Half an hour from Millhaven, Willy fell asleep beside him, her slender hands limp in her lap, her knees sagging to one side, her head on the seat rest so that he could see only the short blond shag of her hair, which had without his noticing become nearly white-blond and seemed to possess, beneath a healthy shine, its own internal radiance. She uttered a few whiffling sounds that sounded like the lost echoes of unspoken words, then fell again into perfect silence.
The next time Tim checked his rearview mirror, he almost drove onto the shoulder of the road. In her blue dress and no doubt wearing a pair of red slippers, his sister, April, was looking at him from the center of the back seat. April’s regard had little of the childish in it. The look in her eye, the expression printed into her unsmiling nine-year-old face, spoke of a steady, familiar impatience. As ever, April hungered to be free, to get out, to be on the other side of all this frustration. More than Cyrax, she was his guide. As he watched, April leaned forward, extended a slightly grubby nine-year-old arm, and, with surpassing gentleness, patted his shoulder.
When Tim Underhill cruised along the overpass from the exit and in the near distance saw the outline of Millhaven rising up, heavy clouds too dark for both the hour and the season hung above the southwest quadrant, far from the granite towers and pillars near the Pforzheimer. He thought,
The Woman
Glimpsed
at the Window
PART FIVE
28
At the Pforzheimer’s front desk, a young clerk who had fallen in love with Willy the moment he looked at her confirmed that Tim had a fifth-floor junior suite in the old part of the hotel. An hour earlier, a suitcase had arrived for him from New York. Underhill preferred the old wing to the more modern tower on the other side of the hotel. The rooms were warmer in tone, and in the mid-eighties he, Michael Poole, and Maggie Lah had spent three memorable nights on that same fifth floor. Plastered with FedEx labels and strapped shut with yellow tape, the suitcase was produced in the care of an old friend and schoolmate of Tim’s, a five-foot-two bellman named Charlie Pelz.
