A light came on in the living room of the house behind him and in bedrooms of the houses on either side.
Fontaine swore, either at me or at the world in general. He came running down the steps, and I tried to get away from him by cutting across the lawn toward John.
'Come back here, Underhill,' Fontaine said.
I stopped running, not because of his words, but because I thought I saw someone moving through the darkness between the houses behind John and Alan Brookner. Alan was staring wildly from Fontaine to me and back, and John was still trying to calm him down.
'I'm not letting you get away,' Fontaine said. The man between the houses across the street had vanished, if he had ever been there at all. The patrol car swung up to the curb about thirty feet away, and Sonny Berenger and another patrolman stepped out. As he uncurled, Sonny was looking straight at John and Alan—he had not even seen us yet.
Then Alan ripped the big revolver out from under John's jacket and jumped down into the street. Instead of going after him, John flattened out on the sidewalk. Alan raised the gun. He fired, and then fired again in a chaos of flares and explosions that filled the street. I heard people yelling and saw Alan drop the gun a second before I realized that I was lying down. I tried to get up. Pain yanked me back down into the grass. I had been hit in the front, but the pain blared out from the hot circle in my back. It felt as if I'd been hit with a sledgehammer.
I turned my head to see Fontaine. The big wheel of the world spun around me. Part of the wheel was a black shoe at the end of what looked like a mile-long gray leg. When the world came right-side up again, I turned my head very slowly in the other direction. I saw the stitching around a buttonhole of a gray suit. The reek of smoke and ashes came from his clothes. On the other side of the buttonhole a white shirt printed with a huge red blossom jerkily rose and fell. Alan had managed to hit us both. I got the elbow of my good arm under me, hitched up my knees, and pushed myself toward him. Then I rolled up on my elbow and saw the other patrolman running toward us.
A few inches away from mine, Fontaine's face was dull with shock. His eyes focused on mine, and his mouth moved.
'Tell me,' I said. I don't know what I meant—tell me everything, tell me how Fee Bandolier turned into Franklin Bachelor. He licked his lips. 'Shit,' he said. His chest jerked up again, and blood gouted out of him and drenched my arm. 'Bell.' Another gout of blood soaked my arm, and the policeman's upper body appeared above us. Two rough hands dragged me away from Fontaine. I said, 'Ouch,' using what felt like commendable restraint, and the cop said, 'Hang in there, just hang in there,' but not to me.
I stared up at the black, starry sky and said, 'Get Sonny.' I hoped I would not die. I was floating in blood.
Then Sonny bent over me. I could hear the other cop doing something to Fontaine and visualized him slapping a big pressure bandage over the wound in his chest. But that was not where we were, that was somewhere else. 'Are you going to make it?' Sonny asked, looking as if he hoped the answer were no.
'I owe you one, and here it is,' I said. 'Along with a lot of other people, Fontaine killed that graduate student and Ransom's wife. He was a Green Beret officer named Franklin Bachelor, and he grew up in this house as Fielding Bandolier. Check up on a company named Elvee Holdings, and you'll find out he was tied into Billy Ritz. Somewhere in this house, you'll find two boxes of notes Fontaine made on all his killings. And inside a couple of boxes in the basement, you'll find his father's photographs of the places where he killed the original Blue Rose victims.'
As I said all this, Sonny's face went from rigid anger to ordinary cop impassivity. I figured that was a long distance. 'I don't know where the notes are, but the pictures are behind the furnace.'
His eyes flicked toward the house. 'Fontaine owns it, through Elvee Holdings. Also the Green Woman Taproom. Look at the Green Woman's basement, you'll see where Billy Ritz died.'
He took it all in—his world was whirling over on itself as sickeningly as mine had just done, but Sonny was not going to fail me. I nearly fainted from sheer relief. 'The ambulance'll be here in a second,' he said. 'That old guy was April Ransom's father?'
I nodded. 'How is he?'
'He's talking about the kingdom of heaven,' Sonny said.
Oh yes, of course. The kingdom of heaven. Where a certain man had wished to kill a noble, tested his sword by striking it against the wall, and gone out and killed the noble. What else would he be talking about?
'How's Fontaine?'
'I think the crazy old bastard killed him,' he said, and then the huge space he had occupied above me was filled again with black, starry night. Sirens came screaming into the street.
PART FOURTEEN
During the journey in the ambulance, as endless as if we were going to some hospital on the moon, my body detached itself from my anxiety and settled into its new condition. I was awash in blood, bathed in it, blood covered my chest and my arms and hung like a sticky red syrup on my face, but most of it belonged to the dead or dying man on the next stretcher. I was going to live. One paramedic labored over Paul Fontaine's body while another cut off my shirt and looked at my wound. He held up two fingers in front of my face and asked how many I saw. 'Three,' I said. 'Just kidding.' He jabbed me with a needle. I heard Fontaine's body leap up off the stretcher as they tried to jump-start him, once, twice, three times. 'Holy moly,' said the paramedic whose face I had not seen, 'I think this guy is Paul Fontaine.'
'No shit,' said the other. His face loomed again above mine, friendly, reassuringly professional, and black. 'Are you a cop, too? What's your name, partner?'
'Fee Bandolier,' I said, and startled him by laughing.
Whatever he had goosed into my veins put my pain to sleep and caused my anxiety to retreat another three or four feet toward the roof of the ambulance, where it hung like an oily cloud. We, the anxiety, the paramedics, the leaping corpse, and myself, whirled forward on our journey to the moon. 'This Fontaine, he's a DOA,' said the other paramedic, and from the oily cloud came the information that I had heard Fontaine's last words, but understood only one of them. He had struggled to speak—he had licked his lips and forced out a syllable he wanted me to hear.
I woke up with the enormous drill-like head of an X-ray machine aimed at the right side of my chest, most of which was covered with a bloody pad. A technician armored in a diving helmet and a lead vest was ordering me to stand still. Instead of my clothes, I was wearing a flimsy blue hospital gown unbuttoned at the back and draped down off my right shoulder like a toga. Someone had cleaned all the blood off me, and I smelled like rubbing alcohol. It came as a surprise that I was standing up by myself. 'Could you please try to stand still?' asked the surly beast in the armor, and the drill clicked and whirred. 'Now turn around, and we'll do your back.' I found that I could turn around. Evidently I had been performing miracles like this for some time. 'We'll have to get that arm up,' said the beast, and came out from behind his machine to take my right arm by the elbow and firmly rip it away from my shoulder. He paid no attention to the noises I made. 'Hold it like that.' Click. Whir. 'You can go back to your room now.'
'Where am I?' I asked, and he laughed. 'I'm serious. What hospital is this?'
