Black House

“It’s the police, that’s who it is. Officer Hrabowski, FLPD. Now you talk to me. Who is this?”

Dale, meanwhile, has got the earphones on his head and is listening to the most recent call to French Landing 911 with mounting horror. Oh dear God, he thinks. His first impulse—the very first—is to call Jack Sawyer and ask for help. To bawl for it, like a little kid with his hand caught in a door. Then he tells himself to take hold, that this is his job, like it or not, and he had better take hold and try to do it. Besides, Jack has gone up to Arden with Fred Marshall to see Fred’s crazy wife. At least that was the plan.

Cops, meanwhile, are clustering around the dispatch desk: Lund, Tcheda, Stevens. What Dale sees when he looks at them is nothing but big eyes and pale, bewildered faces. And the ones on patrol? The ones currently off duty? No better. With the possible exception of Bobby Dulac, no better. He feels despair as well as horror. Oh, this is a nightmare. A truck with no brakes rolling downhill toward a crowded school playground.

He pulls the earphones off, tearing a small cut by his ear, not feeling it. “Where’d it come from?” he asks Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has hung up the telephone and is just sitting there, stunned. Dale grabs his shoulder and gives it a shake. “Where’d it come from?”

“The 7-Eleven,” the Mad Hungarian replies, and Dale hears Danny Tcheda grunt. Not too far from where the Marshall boy’s bike disappeared, in other words. “I just spoke with Mr. Rajan Patel, the day clerk. He says the callback number belongs to the pay phone, just outside.”

“Did he see who made the call?”

“No. He was out back, taking a beer delivery.”

“You positive Patel himself didn’t—”

“Yeah. He’s got an Indian accent. Heavy. The guy on 911 . . . Dale, you heard him. He sounded like anybody.”

“What’s going on?” Pam Stevens asks. She has a good idea, though; they all do. It’s just a question of details. “What’s happened?”

Because it’s the quickest way to get them up to speed, Dale replays the call, this time on speaker.

In the stunned silence that follows, Dale says: “I’m going out to Ed’s Eats. Tom, you’re coming with me.”

“Yessir!” Tom Lund says. He looks almost ill with excitement.

“Four more cruisers to follow me.” Most of Dale’s mind is frozen; this procedural stuff skates giddily on top of the ice. I’m okay at procedure and organization, he thinks. It’s just catching the goddamn psycho murderer that’s giving me a little trouble. “All pairs. Danny, you and Pam in the first. Leave five minutes after Tom and I do. Five minutes by the clock, and no lights or siren. We’re going to keep this quiet just as long as we can.”

Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens look at each other, nod, then look back at Dale. Dale is looking at Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski. He ticks off three more pairs, ending with Dit Jesperson and Bobby Dulac. Bobby is the only one he really wants out there; the others are just insurance and—God grant it not be necessary—crowd control. All of them are to come at five-minute intervals.

“Let me go out, too,” Arnie Hrabowski pleads. “Come on, boss, what do you say?”

Dale opens his mouth to say he wants Arnie right where he is, but then he sees the hopeful look in those watery brown eyes. Even in his own deep distress, Dale can’t help responding to that, at least a little. For Arnie, police life is too often standing on the sidewalk while the parade goes by.

Some parade, he thinks.

“I tell you what, Arn,” he says. “When you finish all your other calls, buzz Debbi. If you can get her in here, you can come out to Ed’s.”

Arnold nods excitedly, and Dale almost smiles. The Mad Hungarian will have Debbi in here by nine-thirty, he guesses, even if he has to drag her by the hair like Alley Oop. “Who do I pair with, Dale?”

“Come by yourself,” Dale says. “In the DARE car, why don’t you? But, Arnie, if you leave this desk without relief waiting to drop into the chair the second you leave it, you’ll be looking for a new job come tomorrow.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Hrabowski says, and, Hungarian or not, in his excitement he sounds positively Suh-vee-dish. Nor is that surprising, since Centralia, where he grew up, was once known as Swede Town.

“Come on, Tom,” Dale says. “We’ll grab the evidence kit on our—”

“Uh . . . boss?”

“What, Arnie?” Meaning, of course, What now?

“Should I call those State Police guys, Brown and Black?”

Danny Tcheda and Pam Stevens snicker. Tom smiles. Dale doesn’t do either. His heart, already in the cellar, now goes even lower. Subbasement, ladies and gentlemen—false hopes on your left, lost causes on your right. Last stop, everybody out.

Perry Brown and Jeff Black. He had forgotten them, how funny. Brown and Black, who would now almost certainly take his case away from him.

“They’re still out at the Paradise Motel,” the Mad Hungarian goes on, “although I think the FBI guy went back to Milwaukee.”

“I—”

“And County,” the Hungarian plows relentlessly along. “Don’t forget them. You want me to call the M.E. first, or the evidence wagon?” The evidence wagon is a blue Ford Econoline van, packed with everything from quick-drying plaster for taking tire impressions to a rolling video studio. Stuff the French Landing P.D. will never have access to.

Dale stands where he is, head lowered, looking dismally at the floor. They are going to take the case away from him. With every word Hrabowski says, that is clearer. And suddenly he wants it for his own. In spite of how he hates it and how it scares him, he wants it with all his heart. The Fisherman is a monster, but he’s not a county monster, a state monster, or a Federal Bureau of Investigation monster. The Fisherman is a French Landing