Smoke

Barney said, 'And you don't make him visible again without clearing with us. The both of us.'

The doctors looked at him in surprise. Loomis said, 'Make him visible? Not possible.'

Barney said, 'What?'

Mordon said, 'You can't undo it?'

'Absolutely not,' Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, 'The computer models were very clear on that.'

Mordon said, 'You're positive.'

'It's a one-way street,' Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, 'Freddie Noon's invisibility is irreversible.'

'Irreversible.'

'Think of albinos,' Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, 'That's a loss of pigmentation in a different way,' and Loomis said, 'Not as thorough, not as severe,' and Heimhocker said, 'But just as irreparable,' and Loomis said, 'You can't paint an albino and expect it to stick,' and Heimhocker said, 'And the same is true, forever, of Freddie Noon.'

'In the movies,' Barney said, 'once the guy is dead, you can see him again.'

Heimhocker curled a lip. 'I have no idea what the scientific basis for that would be,' he said.

'Invisible forever,' Mordon said. He was still getting used to the idea.

'I'm afraid so, yes.'

Barney cleared his throat. 'I tell you what,' he said. 'When Freddie Noon calls you guys, you don't mention that part, you see what I mean?'

'You can call me a worrywart if you want,' Barney said.

They were on the sidewalk in front of the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility. Mordon said, 'Why would I do that, Barney?'

Barney jabbed a thumb at the pretty little townhouse they'd just left, where Shanana continued to observe them from within her oriel. 'I'm gonna tap their phones,' he said.

'Do,' said Mordon.

40

Freddie waltzed into the Big S at five minutes to eight on Thursday evening, two days since he'd first cased the joint and five minutes before it would close for the night. Since being here last, he'd called Jersey Josh for his order — Josh had grumbled about the truck, but finally admitted he could resell it and would therefore buy it — and he'd made his plans, and now Peg had let him off at the front door and he was ready to go.

The first place he went was the rear of the store, where all the garage doors were, some of them shut and some of them open to reveal the insides of big trailers being used as storage. Skipping around workmen on and off forklift trucks, Freddie studied the contents of the various trailers and finally decided that the sixth one from the right would be the most useful. At the moment, it was less than a quarter full, with Japanese VCRs on pallets, stacked to the ceiling at the far end of the trailer.

Outside each trailer, taped to the wall beside the garage-door opening, was a yellow trip sheet that gave that trailer's identification number and a lot of other news. Freddie memorized the number of the sixth trailer from the right — 21409 — and then went on to make the rest of his selections. Since he couldn't carry stuff around with him, not even a pencil and a piece of paper, he had to memorize everything he needed to know, but that was okay. He had a good memory, and nothing to distract him.

He was maybe half an hour at the rear of the building, and then he legged it to the front, headed for the office, and it just seemed as though everything was going to be with him tonight. For instance, he didn't even have to press the button to be let into the stairwell. There was a guy just coming out, papers in hand, a younger and less cigarlike Gus, and Freddie managed to reach behind the guy and stop the door just before it snicked shut. The guy walked on, frowning at his new orders, and Freddie slid inside and upstairs, where clerical crew number two was finishing up the last two hours of the workday, mostly with gossip, and most of the gossip about people on soap operas instead of people they actually knew.

It was easy for Freddie to make his own order, adding a line to a work sheet here, a work sheet there, tapping them out on the computer terminals, whenever the clerks were distracted, which they usually were. By ten past nine, according to the big clock on the wall, his paperwork was finished, and down the stairs he went, and along the row of shops to the restaurant, closed for the night, with a lock on the door that Freddie merely had to caress to get in.

This restaurant was just a sandwich-and-coffee place, which was fine by Freddie. He made himself a nice big sandwich, had a glass of milk, had a piece of pecan pie and another glass of milk, and sat at a booth near the back, where the moving fork and glass couldn't be seen, but he could watch the clerks leave. He did not look down at his stomach.

Ten o'clock. Here they came, in little clusters, moving by the plate-glass windows of the restaurant on their way to the main exit, still talking soap. Then the last of them were gone, and the illumination out there on the selling floor changed as most lights were switched off, to leave just enough for the guards to see what they were doing as they moved around.

On a little two-man electric cart. That was cute; Freddie was sitting there, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for dinner to finish its disappearing act, when whirrr, that little golfcart sort of thing went by, with two rent-a-cops on it, talking sports to each other. Their uniforms were navy blue, almost black, imitation police in style. They carried walkie-talkies in holsters where police carry guns, and they wore their police-type hats farther back on their foreheads than regular cops do. They didn't look as though they expected trouble.

Well, so far as Freddie Noon was concerned, they weren't about to have any trouble, at least not from him. Checking to make sure he was invisible again, leaving his dirty dishes behind to cause an argument among staff tomorrow morning, he let himself out of the restaurant and paused to check things out before heading back to look-see truck 21409.

He could hear the electric cart whirring around here and there, the buzz of it bouncing back at him from the metal rafters up by the roof. Apparently, there was only one cart in operation, with two of the four nighttime guards on it. Moving forward from the restaurant, looking back and up, he saw lights on in the upstairs offices, and one venetian blind raised, and a guard seated at the window there, looking out, which made a lot of sense — good place to station a sentry. The fourth guy he didn't see yet.

No problem. Freddie loped away to the rear of the store, avoiding the electric cart, and truck 21409 was full. Yes, sir. Giving it as much of the double-o as he could from outside, it seemed to Freddie that his orders had been carried out to the letter. The heavy lifting in this caper had been done by others, which was only proper, and now, in addition to the Japanese VCRs that had been in this truck in the first place, there was everything else Jersey Josh had requested: personal-computer terminals, boom boxes, and, God knows why, washing machines. (Jersey Josh could not possibly have wanted those last for himself.)

But here Freddie found guard number four, which created a bit of a snag. The guy was seated in a chair leaning against the rear wall of the building, between two of the open garage doors, and he was doing the puzzles in a crossword-puzzle magazine.

The problem was, Freddie had wanted to pull down and close both the door of truck 21409 and the garage door fronting it, neither of which he could do with that guard sitting there. The truck, maybe, almost, since all he'd have to do was reach up to the dangling leather strap and tug on it, and it might not make too much noise as it rolled down, if he did it slowly and carefully. But the garage door was electric, and clanked; he'd heard these doors clank open and shut his last time here.

Well, so he'd adjust. Leaving those doors open and the guard at his puzzle, continuing to avoid the electric go-cart as it whirred around and around in random patterns, Freddie made his way back to the middle of the store, where he'd noticed a ten-foot-high display of pillows, all in a big wire basket, its sides open enough so the customers could reach in and pull out the pillows they wanted. Freddie now climbed up this basket — the wire was sharp and painful against his bare feet — and when he got to the top he flopped onto the pillows and wallowed around until he was really nestled in, and then he lay there gazing up at the ceiling as he waited for the cleaning crew to arrive. He was as comfortable as he had ever been in his life, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't fall asleeeeeeeeee —

Eleven o'clock. The cleaning crew was here. Freddie knew it was eleven o'clock, and he knew the cleaning crew was here, because the sudden racket they made was so loud and so god-awful that he jumped out of sleep like a deer into your headlights, kicking and flailing in such a panic that he was well and deeply buried in the basket