Black House

Henry says no more for the rest of the drive. Jack is crying.

Henry can smell his tears.

Let us now take the wider view, as some politician or other no doubt said. We almost have to, because things have begun to overlap. While Beezer and the rest of the Thunder Five are arriving in the FLPD parking lot just off Sumner Street, Dale and Tom Lund and Bobby Dulac—bulky in their Kevlar vests—are double-parking in front of Lucky’s. They park in the street because Dale wants plenty of room to swing the back door of the cruiser wide, so that Potter can be bundled in as fast as possible. Next door, Dit Jesperson and Danny Tcheda are at the Nelson Hotel, where they will cordon off room 314 with yellow POLICE LINE tape. Once that’s done, their orders are to bring Andy Railsback and Morty Fine to the police station. Inside the police station, Ernie Therriault is calling WSP officers Brown and Black, who will arrive after the fact . . . and if they’re pissed about that, good deal. At the Sand Bar, a dead-eyed Tansy Freneau has just pulled the plug on the jukebox, killing the Wallflowers. “Listen to me, everybody!” she cries in a voice that’s not her own. “They’ve got him! They’ve got the baby-murdering son of a bitch! His name’s Potter! They’ll have him up in Madison by midnight, and unless we do something, some smart lawyer will have him back out on the street by next Monday! WHO WANTS TO HELP ME DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?” There is a moment of silence . . . and then a roar. The half-stoned, half- drunk habitues of the Sand Bar know exactly what they want to do about it. Jack and Henry, meanwhile, with no fog to slow them down until they hit town, swing into the police station parking lot just behind the Thunder Five, who park in a line around Doc’s Fat Boy. The lot is filling up rapidly, mostly with cops’ personal vehicles. Word of the impending arrest has spread like fire in dry grass. Inside, one of Dale’s crew—we need not bother with exactly which one—spots the blue cell phone Doc used outside Lucky’s. This cop grabs it and ducks into the closet-sized room marked EVIDENCE STORAGE.

At the Oak Tree Inn, where he has checked in for the duration of the Fisherman case, Wendell Green is getting sullenly drunk. In spite of three double whiskeys, his neck still aches from having his camera pulled off by the biker asshole, and his gut still aches from being sucker punched by the Hollywood asshole. The parts of him that hurt most of all, however, are his pride and his pocketbook. Sawyer concealed evidence just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. Wendell is halfway to believing that Sawyer himself is the Fisherman . . . but how can he prove either thing with his film gone? When the bartender says he has a call, Wendell almost tells him to stick the call up his ass. But he’s a professional, goddamnit, a professional news hawk, and so he goes over to the bar and takes the phone.

“Green,” he growls.

“Hello, asshole,” says the cop with the blue cell phone. Wendell doesn’t yet know his caller is a cop, only that it’s some cheery ghoul poaching on his valuable drinking time. “You want to print some good news for a change?”

“Good news doesn’t sell papers, my pal.”

“This will. We caught the guy.”

“What?” In spite of the three doubles, Wendell Green is suddenly the most undrunk man on the planet.

“Did I stutter?” The caller is positively gloating, but Wendell Green no longer cares. “We caught the Fisherman. Not the staties, not the Feebs, us. Name’s George Potter. Early seventies. Retired builder. Had Polaroids of all three dead kids. If you hustle, you can maybe be here to snap the picture when Dale takes him inside.”

This thought—this shining possibility—explodes in Wendell Green’s head like a firework. Such a photo could be worth five times as much as one of little Irma’s corpse, because the reputable mags would want it. And TV! Also, think of this: What if someone shot the bastard as Marshall Dillon was taking him in? Given the town’s mood, it’s far from impossible. Wendell has a brief and brilliant memory of Lee Harvey Oswald clutching his stomach, mouth open in his dying yawp.

“Who is this?” he blurts.

“Officer Fucking Friendly,” the voice on the other end says, and clicks off.

In Lucky’s Tavern, Patty Loveless is now informing those assembled (older than the Sand Bar crowd, and a good deal less interested in nonalcoholic substances) that she can’t get no satisfaction and her tractor can’t get no traction. George Potter has finished his spaghetti, neatly folded his napkin (which in the end had to catch only a single drop of red-sauce), and turned seriously to his beer. Sitting close to the juke as he is, he doesn’t notice that the room has quieted with the entrance of three men, only one in uniform but all three armed and wearing what look too much like bulletproof vests to be anything else.

“George Potter?” someone says, and George looks up. With his glass in one hand and his pitcher of suds in the other, he is a sitting duck.

“Yeah, what about it?” he asks, and then he is snatched by the arms and shoulders and yanked from his spot. His knees connect with the bottom of the table, overturning it. The spaghetti plate and the pitcher hit the floor. The plate shatters. The pitcher, made of sterner stuff, does not. A woman screams. A man says, “Yow!” in a low and respectful voice.

Potter holds on to his partly filled glass for a moment, and then Tom Lund plucks this potential weapon from his hand. A second later, Dale Gilbertson is snapping on the cuffs, and Dale has time to think that it’s the most satisfying sound he’s ever heard in his life. His tractor has finally gotten some traction, by God.

This deal is light-years from the snafu at Ed’s; this is slick and tidy. Less than ten seconds after Dale asked the only question—“George Potter?”—the suspect is out the door and into the fog. Tom has one elbow, Bobby the other. Dale is still rattling off the Miranda warning, sounding like an auctioneer on amphetamines, and George Potter’s feet never touch the sidewalk.

Jack Sawyer is fully alive for the first time since he was twelve years old, riding back from California in a Cadillac Eldorado driven by a werewolf. He has an idea that later on he will pay a high price for this regained vividness, but he hopes he will just button his lip and fork over when the time comes. Because the rest of his adult life now seems so gray.

He stands outside his truck, looking in the window at Henry. The air is dank and already charged with excitement. He can hear the blue-white parking lot lights sizzling, like something frying in hot juices.

“Henry.”

“Affirmative.”

“Do you know the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’?”