It wouldn't have taken but a moment or two, Max realized ruefully, knuckling himself on the forehead the way Miss Miller used to when he'd screwed up: Hello? Anybody home in there? He could have stomped Pender, strangled him silently, suffocated him-shit, he could have stood on Pender's throat while he was changing clothes with Twombley, and not lost a single goddamn second. Maxwell's adrenaline began flowing again-he broke out into a sweat.
Steady-steady now. This is not the time to panic. Max slowed his breathing, calmed himself, and began reasoning through the problem. In the first place, he didn't know for sure that Pender was still alive. Max didn't remember seeing him breathe-and he sure as shit wasn't moving.
In the second place, even if Pender had survived, after three whacks on the skull-three Lee whacks-his brains were probably so scrambled he'd be lucky if he could remember his own name.
And in the third place, even if Pender were both alive and compos mentis, there were no Lone Rangers in the FBI. Anything Pender knew, other agents almost certainly knew-and if they'd had any reason to connect him to Scorned Ridge, they'd have been up there digging a long time ago.
No harm, no foul, Max reassured himself-he hadn't put the system into any further jeopardy by failing to finish Pender off. Which meant all he had to do now was find a secure place inside the jail to hole up until the fuss around him died down.
So moving as quietly as he could in Twombley's leather-soled cop shoes, which were two sizes too large for him, Max made his way up to the second floor, where the cells were stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with court records in cardboard boxes. Alarmingly, the corners of the floor-level boxes had been chewed through by rats.
Max shuddered and backed away-he didn't care for rodents. Eventually he found a windowless isolation cell deep in the interior of the building. The door had been removed and was leaning against the wall; just inside the entrance the flashlight beam picked out the skeleton of a pigeon lying in the dust, undisturbed by rodents, skull and ribcage intact, the long bones of the wings, feathers still attached, fanned out in perfect deltas.
It was ideal for his purposes-if the rats hadn't come in here to eat a dead pigeon, they certainly wouldn't be bothering a live human. He could hear sirens in the street below, pounding footsteps, urgent voices. A Chinese fire drill, he chuckled. They seek him here, they seek him there.
Enormously pleased with himself, he switched off the flashlight and settled down with his back to the wall to wait them out. It was pitch-black; he literally couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Which didn't bother Max any-he wasn't afraid of the dark. He knew who was, though, and it occurred to Max that perhaps the time had come to teach Lyssy the Sissy a lesson, once and for all.
22
Three times the handcuff bracelet clenched in Maxwell's fist had come crashing down on the crown of Pender's skull. He felt only the first blow, as a jarring sensation, followed by the sort of breathless, welling nausea that usually follows a swift kick in the nuts.
Stunned, all but paralyzed, he saw the prisoner's hand rise and fall, rise and fall again, but couldn't make sense of what he saw. Couldn't hear anything, either, until he closed his eyes and began to tumble through darkness. As he fell, and fell, and fell, all the hollow, distant sounds of the jail, fragments of Spanish from the other cells, a toilet flushing, the sleighbell jingle of chains and fetters, washed over him with a roar like breaking waves.
He opened his eyes. The surf sounds abruptly ceased-the world was devoid of sound. He saw the cell bars, inexplicably horizontal-it wasn't until the deputy appeared in front of him that Pender understood that he was lying on the cell floor, on his side. It dizzied him to try to focus on the face filling his field of visionit was distorted longitudinally, as if through a fish-eye lens. Then it disappeared. Pender felt an urge, not framed in words, to apologize to somebody about something, and as he closed his eyes and gave in to the darkness, he was overwhelmed by regret.
Time had passed-how much, Pender couldn't say. Now that the pain was in his head, his mind was paradoxically clear. He saw Twombley's underwear-clad body lying a few feet away and realized from the angle of his head that there was nothing that could be done for him.
McDougal will be so pissed, thought Pender. Got to help. Help me do this.
That last was a prayer-and Pender was not a praying man. But the results surprised him. Time slowed. Despite the pain he managed to raise himself up on his hands and knees, head hanging; he could see the blood from his scalp falling to the cement floor, drop by drop. Sometimes there were three or four drops in the air at the same time, like black rubies strung on an invisible chain.
Along with the clarity of vision came an increasing clarity of mind. His thoughts raced along swiftly, transparent and weightless. What have I learned that can help them? The motel in Dallas? The hooker? Old news. What's current? The shrink-he said something about hooking up with the shrink. What was her name? Hogan? No, Cogan.
Swaying, his left hand pressed against the dripping scalp wounds to slow the bleeding, he dipped his right forefinger into the warm pool where his head had rested on the cement floor, and wrote the following in his own blood:
Kogin akomplis?
Pender's strength failed him at the end. He drew the question mark lying on his belly. His use of phonic spelling was inadvertent. Whatever circuits in the brain governed that particular function must have been scrambled-he didn't even notice the misspellings until he found himself looking down from somewhere around ceiling height. From that lofty vantage he saw the two bodies below him, his own and the deputy's, the pool of blood, the clumsy scrawl. Then the walls and bars disappeared-he was in the dark; a tiny figure was walking toward him, the light streaming from behind it.
I don't believe in this crap, he thought, hurrying forward to meet whoever it was. It's a dream-it's only one last dream.
But what a dream. The figure grew larger. It was Pender's father, not as he'd been at the end, shrunken by cancer, but strong and tall and broad-shouldered in the bemedaled dress blues that he wore in the Veteran's Day parade every year in Cortland when Edgar was growing up. As a kid, Ed knew what every medal and ribbon represented, which was the Purple Heart and which the Silver Star. They'd buried the old man with them.
“Daddy?”
“It ain't Elvis, son,” said First Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, USMC, Ret. “You ready to go?”
“I don't know.”
“What do you mean, you don't know? Got any unfinished business?”
“The guy that killed me-he got away.”
“The one that killed all them women?”
“That's the one.”
His father laughed. “Well, shit, boy, he ain't killed you yet. Call me if he does, I'll come back for you. And don't forget, quitters never win, and Penders never quit.”
And with that, Sergeant R. L. Pender executed a smart about-face and marched back up the slope, leaving Ed alone. He looked down, saw his body lying on its face, right arm extended, as if pointing to the words he had scrawled in blood on the cell floor. It was still bleeding, still breathing-and a moment later he was back inside it.
I still don't believe in this crap, thought Pender. Then the pain hit him, and he lost consciousness again.
23
Lyssy the Sissy was frightened. He didn't like the dark. And this dark was worse than the closet his father used to lock him in. Because at least in the closet, even if you couldn't get out, you knew nothing else was going to come in.
