Black House

He listens some more, then says: “If it’s a Nokia—which is what it feels like and sounds like—then it’s digital rather than analog. Wait.” He looks at Jack. “Your cell,” he says. “It’s a Nokia?”

“Yes, but why—”

“Because digital phones are supposedly harder to snoop,” Henry says, and goes back to the phone. “It’s a digital, and I’ll put him on. I’m sure Jack can explain everything.” Henry hands him the telephone, folds his hands primly in his lap, and looks out the window exactly as he would if surveying the scenery. And maybe he is, Jack thinks. Maybe in some weird fruit-bat way, he really is.

He pulls over to the shoulder on Highway 93. He doesn’t like the cell phone to begin with—twenty-first-century slave bracelets, he thinks them—but he absolutely loathes driving while talking on one. Besides, Irma Freneau isn’t going anywhere this morning.

“Dale?” he says.

“Where are you?” Dale asks, and Jack knows at once that the Fisherman has been busy elsewhere, too. As long as it’s not another dead kid, he thinks. Not that, not yet, please. “How come you’re with Henry? Is Fred Marshall there, too?”

Jack tells him about the change in plan, and is about to go on when Dale breaks in.

“Whatever you’re doing, I want you to get your ass out to a place called Ed’s Eats and Dawgs, near Goltz’s. Henry can help you find it. The Fisherman called the station, Jack. He called 911. Told us Irma Freneau’s body is out there. Well, not in so many words, but he did say she.”

Dale is not quite babbling, but almost. Jack notes this as any good clinician would note the symptoms of a patient.

“I need you, Jack. I really—”

“That’s where we were headed anyway,” Jack says quietly, although they are going absolutely nowhere at this moment, just sitting on the shoulder while the occasional car blips past on 93.

“What?”

Hoping that Dale and Henry are right about the virtues of digital technology, Jack tells French Landing’s police chief about his morning delivery, aware that Henry, although still looking out the window, is listening sharply. He tells Dale that Ty Marshall’s cap was on top of the box with the feathers and Irma’s foot inside it.

“Holy . . .” Dale says, sounding out of breath. “Holy shit.”

“Tell me what you’ve done,” Jack says, and Dale does. It sounds pretty good—so far, at least—but Jack doesn’t like the part about Arnold Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has impressed him as the sort of fellow who will never be able to behave like a real cop, no matter how hard he tries. Back in L.A., they used to call the Arnie Hrabowskis of the world Mayberry RFDs.

“Dale, what about the phone at the 7-Eleven?”

“It’s a pay phone,” Dale says, as if speaking to a child.

“Yes, but there could be fingerprints,” Jack says. “I mean, there are going to be billions of fingerprints, but forensics can isolate the freshest. Easily. He might have worn gloves, but maybe not. If he’s leaving messages and calling cards as well as writing to the parents, he’s gone Stage Two. Killing isn’t enough for him anymore. He wants to play you now. Play with you. Maybe he even wants to be caught and stopped, like Son of Sam.”

“The phone. Fresh fingerprints on the phone.” Dale sounds badly humiliated, and Jack’s heart goes out to him. “Jack, I can’t do this. I’m lost.”

This is something to which Jack chooses not to speak. Instead he says, “Who’ve you got who can see to the phone?”

“Dit Jesperson and Bobby Dulac, I guess.”

Bobby, Jack thinks, is entirely too good to waste for long at the 7-Eleven outside town. “Just have them crisscross the phone with yellow tape and talk to the guy on duty. Then they can come on out to the site.”

“Okay.” Dale hesitates, then asks a question. The defeat in it, the sense of almost complete abrogation, makes Jack sad. “Anything else?”

“Have you called the State Police? County? Does that FBI guy know? The one who thinks he looks like Tommy Lee Jones?”

Dale snorts. “Uh . . . actually, I’d decided to sit on notification for a little while.”

“Good,” Jack says, and the savage satisfaction in his voice causes Henry to turn from his blind regard of the countryside and regard his friend instead, eyebrows raised.

Let us rise up again—on wings as eagles, as the Reverend Lance Hovdahl, French Landing’s Lutheran pastor, might say—and fly down the black ribbon of Highway 93, back toward town. We reach Route 35 and turn right. Closer and to our right is the overgrown lane that leads not to a dragon’s hidden gold or secret dwarf mines but to that peculiarly unpleasant black house. A little farther on, we can see the futuristic dome shape of Goltz’s (well . . . it seemed futuristic in the seventies, at least). All our landmarks are in place, including the rubbly, weedy path that shoots off from the main road to the left. This is the track that leads to the remains of Ed Gilbertson’s erstwhile palace of guilty pleasures.

Let us flutter onto the telephone line just across from this track. Hot gossip tickles our birdy feet: Paula Hrabowski’s friend Myrtle Harrington passing on the news of the dead body (or bodies) at Ed’s to Richie Bumstead, who will in turn pass it on to Beezer St. Pierre, grieving father and spiritual leader of the Thunder Five. This passage of voices through the wire probably shouldn’t please us, but it does. Gossip is no doubt nasty stuff, but it does energize the human spirit.

Now, from the west comes the cruiser with Tom Lund at the wheel and Dale Gilbertson in the shotgun seat. And from the east comes Jack’s burgundy-colored Ram pickup. They reach the turnoff to Ed’s at the same time. Jack motions for Dale to go first, then follows him. We take wing, fly above and then ahead of them. We roost on the rusty Esso gas pump to watch developments.