The Stand

“Hi, Shirley, it’s Lloyd.”

“Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?”

“Not too bad, Shirl. Can you try 6214 for me?”

“Paul? He’s not home. He’s out at Indian Springs. Bet I could catch him for you at BaseOps.”

“Okay, try that.”

“You bet. Say, Lloyd, when you gonna come over and try some of my coffee cake? I bake fresh every two, three days.”

“Soon, Shirley,” Lloyd said, grimacing. Shirley was forty, ran about one-eighty… and had set her cap for Lloyd. He took a lot of ribbing about her, especially from Whitney and Ronnie Sykes. But she was a fine telephone operator, able to do wonders with the Las Vegas phone system. Getting the phones working—the most important ones, anyway—had been their first priority after the power, but most of the automatic switching equipment had burned out, and so they were back to the equivalent of tin cans and lots of waxed string. There were also constant outages. Shirley handled what there was to handle with uncanny skill, and she was patient with the three or four other operators, who were still learning.

Also, she did make nice coffee cake.

“Real soon,” he added, and thought of how nice it would be if Julie Lawry’s firm, rounded body could be grafted onto Shirley Dunbar’s skills and gentle, uncomplaining nature.

She seemed satisfied. There were beeps and boops on the line, and one high-pitched, echoing whine that made him hold the handset away from his ear, grimacing. Then the phone rang at the other end in a series of hoarse burrs.

“Bailey, Ops,” a voice made tinny by distance said.

“This is Lloyd,” he bellowed into the phone. “Is Paul there?”

“Haul what, Lloyd?” Bailey asked.

“Paul! Paul Burlson! ”

“Oh, him! Yeah, he’s right here having a Co-Cola.”

There was a pause—Lloyd began to think that the tenuous connection had been broken—and then Paul came on.

“We’re going to have to shout, Paul. The connection stinks.” Lloyd wasn’t completely sure that Paul Burlson had the lung capacity to shout. He was a scrawny little man with thick lenses in his glasses, and some men called him Mr. Cool because he insisted on wearing a complete three-piece suit each day despite the dry crunch of the Vegas heat. But he was a good man to have as your information officer, and Flagg had told Lloyd in one of his expansive moods that by 1991 Burlson would be in charge of the secret police. And he’ll be sooo good at it, Flagg had added with a warm and loving smile.

Paul did manage to speak a little louder.

“Have you got your directory with you?” Lloyd asked.

“Yes. Stan Bailey and I were going over a work rotation program.”

“See if you’ve got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?”

“Just a second.” A second stretched out to two or three minutes, and Lloyd began to wonder again if they had been cut off. Then Paul said, “Okay, Tom Cullen… you there, Lloyd?”

“Right here.”

“You can never be sure, with the phones the way they are. He’s somewhere between twenty-two and thirty- five at a guess. He doesn’t know for sure. Light mental retardation. He has some work skills. We’ve had him on the clean-up crew.”

“How long has he been in Vegas?”

“Something less than three weeks.”

“From Colorado?”

“Yes, but we have a dozen people over here who tried it over there and decided they didn’t like it. They drove this guy out. He was having sex with a normal woman and I guess they were afraid for their gene pool.” Paul laughed.

“Got his address?”

Paul gave it to him and Lloyd jotted it down in his notebook.

“That it, Lloyd?”

“One other name, if you’ve got the time.”

Paul laughed—a small man’s fussy laugh. “Sure, it’s only my coffee break.”

“The name is Nick Andros.”

Paul said instantly: “I have that name on my red list.”

“Oh?” Lloyd thought as quickly as he could, which was far from the speed of light. He had no idea what Paul’s “red list” might be. “Who gave you his name?”

Exasperated, Paul said: “Who do you think? The same person that gave me all the red list names.”

“Oh. Okay.” He said goodbye and hung up. Small-talk was impossible with the bad connection, and Lloyd had too much to think about to want to make it, anyway.

Red list.

Names that Flagg had given to Paul and to no one else, apparently—although Paul had assumed Lloyd knew all about it. Red list, what did that mean? Red meant stop.

Red meant danger.

Lloyd lifted the telephone again.

“Operator.”

“Lloyd again, Shirl.”

“Well, Lloyd, did you—”

“Shirley, I can’t gab. I’m onto something that’s maybe big.”

“Okay, Lloyd.” Shirley’s voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.

“Who’s catching at Security?”

“Barry Dorgan.”

“Get him for me. And I never called you.”

“Yes, Lloyd.” She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited.

A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful. Too many men of the Poke Freeman type had gravitated toward the police department.

“I want you to pick someone up for me,” Lloyd said. “Get him alive. I have to have him alive even if it means you lose men. His name is Tom Cullen and you can probably catch him at home. Bring him to the Grand.” He gave Barry Tom’s address and then made him repeat it back.

“How important is this, Lloyd?”

“Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you.”

“Okay.” Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you.

Barry called back an hour later to say he was fairly sure Tom Cullen had split.

“But he’s feeble,” Barry went on, “and he can’t drive. Not even a motor-scooter. If he’s going east, he can’t be any further than Dry Lake. We can catch him, Lloyd, I know we can. Give me a green light.” Barry was fairly drooling. He was one of four or five people in Vegas who knew about the spies, and he had read Lloyd’s thoughts.

“Let me think this over,” Lloyd said, and hung up before Barry could protest. He had gotten better at thinking things over than he would have believed possible in the pre-flu days, but he knew this was too big for him. And that red list business troubled him. Why hadn’t he been told about that?

For the first time since meeting Flagg in Phoenix, Lloyd had the disquieting feeling that his position might be vulnerable. Secrets had been kept. They could probably still get Cullen; both Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson could fly the army choppers that were hangared out at the Springs, and if they had to they could close every road going out of Nevada to the east. Also, the guy wasn’t Jack the Ripper or Dr. Octopus; he was a feeb on the run. But Christ! If he had known about this Andros what’s-his-face when Julie Lawry had come to see him, they might have been able to take him right in his little North Vegas apartment.

Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg