Fear itself

myself to look at the window, in case his face pops up there. In the fourth place: you’re the one who keeps saying he’s probably within driving distance of Berkeley, and in case you’ve forgotten, this house, my home, which he’s already invaded once, is very much within driving distance. Is that enough places for you yet? ’Cause if it’s not, I can come up with a whole lot more.”

He raised both hands, palms out. “Okay, okay, I surrender.” But half an hour later he sneaked out of the house via the studio door while Dorie was on the phone with one of her girlfriends-better to ask forgiveness than permission was as effective a strategy with women as it was with the Bureau.

Some women, anyway: when Pender reached the driveway, he stuck his hand into his pants pocket for his keys and came up empty. He told himself they must have fallen out of his pocket when he took his pants off last night. As he tiptoed into the house and past the kitchen on his way up to the bedroom, though, Pender heard a familiar jingling sound and backed up to see Dorie seated at the kitchen table, telephone in one hand, his key ring dangling from the thumb and forefinger of the other.

“Be with you in a minute there, Lone Ranger,” she said, and jingled the keys merrily again.

Just as well, thought Pender-he’d forgotten that he couldn’t work the damn shift anyway.

4

Conventional wisdom would argue that Simon Childs’s use of powerful pharmaceuticals, on top of all the other stress he was under, could only have served to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of an already unstable personality.

Simon would have disagreed-and a case could well be made that the serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting effects of 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, also known as MDMA, Adam, or Ecstasy, in addition to the weed and the Percodan, were indeed having a pacifying effect on him.

But Simon was no pharmacologist. All he knew was that he’d stepped into the little stall shower in the guest bathroom half a jump ahead of the blind rat, and emerged feeling as giddy as a schoolboy and so full of fellow- feeling that on his way upstairs, he took the time to rearrange the body on the chrome and leather couch into as comfortable a position as rigor mortis would allow and cover it with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket from the spare bedroom.

Simon was feeling so mellow, in fact, that upon his return to the bedroom, before sitting down at the vanity to roll another doob, he removed the sheet he’d draped over the mirror earlier, and played a quick round of Senor Wences-”S’awright? S’awright! S’okay? S’okay!”-with Grandfather Childs.

That was pushing it, though: once the joint-a better effort than the last one-was rolled, tempting as it would have been to watch his grandfather toke up, Simon turned his back on the old man. He took a deep drag-his glance fell upon the canvas travel bag on the floor next to him. He unzipped it a few inches to peek in on the king and the coral, sleeping peacefully in the bottom, entwined in each other’s arms like an old married couple.

“Except you don’t have any arms, do you?” giggled Simon, zipping the bag, then unzipping it again. “S’awright…?” “S’awright!” he called in two different voices.

But why this sudden obsession with Senor Wences? he asked himself. Hadn’t thought of the old ventriloquist from the Ed Sullivan Show in years, and now he was practically channeling him. Eventually it came to him: he missed his sister. Missy had been so taken with Senor Wences that she’d spent most of 1959 with a little face painted on the thumb side of her fist. “Eassy for you, deefeecul’ for meee,” she used to croon to her hand. Not that anybody but me ever understood her, Simon thought sadly.

But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag-God bless it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness-Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.

“No big deal,” he muttered to himself, zipping up the bag again-the scarlet king snake was only an enhancement. He’d planned to use it to deliver a few practice bites first-something that was not, of course, feasible with the coral-so he could watch Skairdykat’s panic slowly build as she waited for the venom to take effect. And as soon as it began to dawn on her that the king snake was harmless, it would be time to bring out the real deal.

That had been the plan, anyway. But as long as he still had the coral, he reminded himself, Skairdykat’s game would not be seriously compromised. And after Skairdykat, Pender: the plans for that game had been hatching ever since La Farge, as the eyeless corpse on the living room couch mutely attested.

And yet, under the enforced calm of the Ecstasy, Simon was vaguely aware of a budding anxiety. Somehow it seemed that the closer he got to Pender’s game, the less anxious he was to have it over with. That was probably why he’d driven east after La Farge, instead of south to Maryland, he was beginning to understand, why he’d detoured through Allenwood and Georgetown, risking life and liberty for a game with Skairdykat. It had been Pender’s game that had been driving him ever since Missy died, but thinking about what came after Pender was like speculating on what came after infinity, what lay beyond the borders of the universe.

A fellow could hurt himself, trying to wrap his mind around a paradox like that-especially a fellow as stoned and as constitutionally unable to contemplate the possibility of his impending nonexistence as Simon Childs. So what Simon asked himself instead was whether he had any unfinished business here in the east. And when the answer came up yes, he knew what his next move had to be.

5

Dorie steered the Toyota through the wide, empty suburban streets of Rancho del Vista, past cookie-cutter colonials with wide, empty suburban lawns.

“Speaking as a plein air painter, if I lived around here, I’d starve,” she said. “No damn ranchos, no damn vistas.”

“Yeah, but at least there’s plenty of parking.” Pender was navigating with the aid of a point-to-point map Dorie had printed out from MapQuest.com, which had recently been voted one of the top ten “Sites That Don’t Suck” on the Internet. “Okay, left on Guerrero…right on Oaxaca…” The streets were all named for Mexican states- so the gardeners would feel at home, according to the local wits. “And…here we go, twelve-eleven Baja Way.”

The driveway was empty, but Pender had Dorie drive past and park on the street, two houses down. She started to scoff. “C’mon, Pen. What are the chances he was even here in the first place, much less-?”

He cut her off long before she got to the second place. “You painter, me FBI,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and donning his new Panama, which he had to take off in the car-insufficient headroom. “Until I’ve established with one hundred percent confidence that he’s not in there, I’ll run the show. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good. Wait here.”

“Yes, sir!” replied Dorie, who was not entirely unfamiliar with the better-to-ask-forgiveness- than-permission theory herself.

Mailbox stuffed. Driveway empty. Blinds drawn, upstairs and down. Front door locked; garage door locked. Pender walked around back. The landscaping was minimal, the fences low-not much privacy here at Rancho del Vista, despite the spacious lots. There was a patio, backed by a floor-to-ceiling picture window, but the curtains were drawn. He put his ear to the glass: not a sound inside the house.

Nobody home, thought Pender, trying the patio door, which was also locked. It happens-that’s the drawback of dropping by unannounced. But he continued his circumambulation, and when he came around the front of the house again, he saw Dorie at the end of the driveway, chatting with the mailman. She waved him over.

“Ted, tell Special Agent Pender what you just told me.”