He was hoping for the former of course-mostly so he could catch those other sons of bitches-but he wasn’t afraid of the latter. Some two years earlier, Pender had had a near-death experience on the floor of a holding cell in the old Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California. Not only had he seen the glowing light at the end of the tunnel, but his father, former Marine Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, had made an appearance in his dress blues, and ever since that moment, Edgar Lee Pender had known with a certainty that amounted to spiritual conviction that there was nothing to fear there.
Still, he fought against sleep as long as he could. Eventually, though, he succumbed, and when he opened his eyes again and saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he couldn’t be sure which light it was, or which tunnel, the one made of dirt or the one made of the glory.
Doesn’t matter, he told himself, closing his eyes again-you’ll find out soon enough.
9
Holly took the kids back to the Core. Dawson stuck around. The sexist pricks wouldn’t let her into the tunnel to dig, so she joined the bucket brigade passing the shoring upward and the excavated dirt downward. She was close enough to the mouth of the tunnel to hear the cheering inside when they spotted Pender’s light. After that, it only took another two or three eons until the hole was wide enough for the first paramedic to squeeze through.
Chief Coffee was the second one through. He emerged after a few minutes shining a flashlight onto a thick sheaf of paper. Whatever was written on it, it must have made fascinating reading, thought Dawson-Coffee was reading as he crawled out of the tunnel, still reading when he stood up, still reading by flashlight as he hurried back down the trail.
It was full daylight when they brought Pender out on a stretcher. Somehow Dawson, despite having spent more than half her life hiding in shadows and ducking authority, had no trouble pushing her way through the crowd. Pender’s head was turbaned in gauze, an oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth, an IV dripped clear liquid into his arm. She fell in behind the stretcher bearers, and when they called for a relief crew halfway down the trail, Dawson was first in line.
And when the paramedics tried to stop her from getting into the ambulance, she told them she was his fiancee and climbed in anyway.
For his second stay in Missionary Hospital in less than a week, with no alibi witnesses required this time, Lewis Apgard had demanded a private room. He continued to profess amnesia. Dr. Vogler was called in. Lewis repeated what he’d told Detective Hamilton after “regaining” consciousness: that the Epps and Bennie had appeared at his door after Pender left, demanded to know what they’d talked about, then forced him at gunpoint to help them kidnap Pender and the girl and drive them into the rain forest. Everything after that, until he woke up in the ambulance, was a blank.
Vogler bought it, diagnosed him with temporary amnesia as a result of the traumatic reinjury of his head wound. Afterward Lewis slept surprisingly soundly (considering they had refused to give him any painkillers or sedatives, because of the head trauma), and if he’d had any dreams, he didn’t remember them.
Until the last one, that is. It came when he fell back to sleep after being awakened at dawn by the nurse who was taking his vital signs. Lewis found himself in the drawing room of the Great House. He was a boy again, and somehow the Guv had found out about Lewis’s role in Auntie Aggie’s death. The old man was mad lak fuck. I should have known, he said. I should have seen it in your eyes. Then he pointed to a mirror, which now hung beneath the portrait of Great-great-grandfather Klaus.
Reluctantly, the boy crossed the room, his feet sinking into the thick carpet with every step. When he reached the mirror, he saw the ram’s eyes staring back at him, brown and mournful, from his own face. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t.
The Guv laughed his crackly dry laugh. You take after your mother, he said. That’s her side of the family. But when Lewis turned around, he saw the same eyes looking out at him from the old man’s face. Lewis, said the Guv. Lewis, wake up.
“Lewis, wake up.”
Lewis opened his eyes to see Chief Coffee standing over him. The customarily natty old guy was a mess. His khaki uniform was spattered with drying mud, his face was smeared with it, and he even had muddy streaks in his nappy silver hair. “Good morning, Lewis,” he said.
“Good morning, Chief Coffee,” said Lewis, as the memory of the dream receded to wherever dream memories go.
10
Dawson was separated from Pender at the hospital, but somebody must have passed on the word that she was his fiancee, because in a few minutes the neurosurgeon, an East Indian doctor with a name that was so close to Ramalamadingdong that that was how she would remember it for the rest of her life, came out into the waiting room to tell her that they were taking Pender down to Radiology for a CAT scan.
Nobody said she could come along, but nobody said she couldn’t. She followed the gurney to the elevator, then took the stairs to the basement. For pure, concentrated suspense, waiting alone in a molded plastic chair in the corridor outside the swinging doors marked RADIOLOGY beat everything that had come before, because there was nothing she could do but wait. No cave to find, no buckets to pass, no stretchers to bear.
There was a clock at the end of the hall, by the elevator. She couldn’t see the second hand, but the minute hand was moving so slowly she decided the clock had to be broken. She closed her eyes and forced herself to count to a hundred; when she opened them to see if the minute hand had moved, Dr. Ramalamadingdong was standing over her.
“How’d it go? Is he going to be all right?”
“We didn’t get a chance to run the scan. Follow me.”
“How are you feeling?” Chief Coffee asked Lewis.
“Much better.”
“Do you remember-”
Lewis interrupted him. “Like I’ve been telling everybody, I don’t remember much about last night.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you about last night.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
“I was going to ask you about last Thursday, when Agent Pender and I informed you that Hokey had been murdered.”
“What about it?”
“Do you remember the last thing you asked me, just before we parted company?”
“Afraid not,” said Lewis.
“You asked if you could be present when we hanged whoever was responsible for Hokey’s death.”
“And…?”
“And the answer is yes, you will be.”
Dawson’s heart sank. She followed Dr. Ramalamadingdong numbly through the swinging doors and saw Pender struggling to sit up on the gurney, with a tech and a nurse fighting to hold him down.
“Ed!”
“Dawson?”
He stopped struggling, went limp. The tech and the nurse stepped back. Dawson found herself standing beside the gurney without any memory of having crossed the room. They had started to unwind Pender’s bandage- he was trailing gauze like the Mummy. “The little girl?” he said hoarsely.
“She’s fine-she’s back at the Core with Holly.”
“Thank God.”
