at this point.
It was Charlie.
The two of them had an appointment. He was going to look into her eyes, and she was going to look into his… and it might well be that they would step out together, in flames. The fact that he might be saving the world from some almost unimaginable armageddon by killing her had not played a part in his calculations, either. He owed the world no more fealty than he did the Shop. It was the world as much as the Shop that had cast him rootless from a closed desert society that might have been his only salvation… or, lacking that, have turned him into a harmless Sterno-guzzling Injun Joe pumping gas at a 76 station or selling fake kachina dolls at a shitty little roadside stand somewhere along the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix.
But Charlie, Charlie!
They had been locked in a long waltz of death since that endless night of darkness during the power blackout. What he had only suspected that early morning in Washington when he had done Wanless had developed into an irrefutable certainty: the girl was his. But it would be an act of love, not of destruction, because the converse was almost certainly true as well.
It was acceptable. In many ways he wanted to die. And to die at her hands, in her flames, would be an act of contrition… and possibly of absolution. Once she and her father were together again, she would become a loaded gun… no, a loaded flamethrower. He would watch her and he would let the two of them get together. What would happen then? Who knew? And wouldn’t knowing spoil the fun?
19
That night Rainbird went to Washington and found a hungry lawyer who worked late hours. To this lawyer he gave three hundred dollars in small bills. And in the lawyer’s office, John Rainbird neatened his few affairs in order to be ready for the next day.
FIRESTARTER
1
At six o'clock on Wednesday morning, Charlie McGee got up, took off” her nightgown, and stepped into the shower. She washed her body and her hair, then turned the water to cold and stood shivering under the spray for a minute more. She toweled dry and then dressed carefully-cotton underpants, silk slip, dark-blue knee socks, her denim jumper. She finished by putting on her scuffed and comfortable loafers.
She hadn’t thought she would be able to sleep at all last night; she had gone to bed full of fear and nervous excitement. But she had slept. And dreamed incessantly not of Necromancer and the run through the woods but of her mother. That was peculiar, because she didn’t think of her mother as often as she used to; at times her face seemed misty and distant in her memory, like a faded photograph. But in her dreams of last night, her mother’s faceher laughing eyes, her warm, generous mouth-had been so clear that Charlie might last have seen her just the day before.
Now, dressed and ready for the day, some of the unnatural lines of strain had gone out. of her face and she seemed calm. On the wall beside the door leading into the kitchenette there was a call button and a speaker grille set into a brushed-chrome plate just below the light switch. She pressed the button now.
“Yes, Charlie?”
She knew the owner of the voice only as Mike. At seven o'clock-about half an hour from now-Mike went off and Louis came on. “I want to go out to the stables this afternoon,” she said, “and see Necromancer. Will you tell someone?”
“I’ll leave a note for Dr. Hockstetter, Charlie.”
“Thank you.” She paused, just for a moment. You got to know their voices. Mike, Louis, Gary. You got pictures of how they must look in your mind, the way you got pictures of how the DJs you heard on the radio must look. You got to like them. She suddenly realized that she would almost certainly never talk to Mike again.
“Was there something else, Charlie?”
“No, Mike. Have… have a good day.”
“Why, thank you, Charlie.” Mike sounded both surprised and pleased. “You too.” She turned on the TV and tuned to a cartoon show that came on every morning over the cable. Popeye was inhaling spinach through his pipe and getting ready to beat the sauce out of Bluto. One o'clock seemed an age away.
What if Dr. Hockstetter said, she couldn’t go out? On the TV screen, they were showing a cutaway view of Popeye’s muscles. There were about sixteen turbine engines in each one.
2
Andy’s rest hadn’t been as easy or as healing as his daughter’s. He had tossed and turned, sometimes dozing, then starting out of the doze just as it began to deepen because the terrible leading edge of some nightmare touched his mind. The only one he could remember was Charlie staggering down the aisle between the stalls in the stable, her head gone and red-blue flames spouting from her neck instead of blood.
He had meant to stay in bed until seven o'clock, but when the digital face of the clock beside the bed got to 6:15, he could wait no longer. He swung out and headed for the shower.
Last night at just past nine, Pynchot’s former assistant, Dr. Nutter, had come in with Andy’s walking papers. Nutter, a tall, balding man in his late fifties, was bumbling and avuncular. Sorry to be losing you; hope you enjoy your stay in Hawaii; wish I was going with you, ha-ha; please sign this.
The paper Nutter wanted him to sign was a list of his few personal effects (including his keyring, Andy noticed with a nostalgic pang). He would be expected to inventory them once in Hawaii and initial another sheet that said that they had, indeed, been returned. They wanted him to sign a paper concerning his personal effects after they had murdered his wife, chased him and Charlie across half the country, and then kidnapped and held them prisoner: Andy found that darkly hilarious and Kafkaesque. I sure wouldn’t want to lose any of those keys, he thought, scrawling his signature; I might need one of them to open a bottle of soda with sometime, right, fellows?
There was also a carbon of the Wednesday schedule, neatly initialed by Cap at the bottom of the page. They would be leaving at twelve-thirty, Cap picking Andy up at his quarters. He and Cap would proceed toward the eastern checkpoint, passing Parking Area C, where they would pick up an escort of two cars. They would then drive to Andrews and board the plane at approximately fifteen hundred hours. There would be one stop for refueling-at Durban Air Force Base, near Chicago.
He dressed and began to move about the apartment, packing his clothes, shaving tackle, shoes, bedroom slippers. They had provided him with two Samsonite suitcases. He remembered to do it all slowly, moving with the careful concentration of a drugged man.
After he found out about Rainbird from Cap, his first thought had been a hope that he would meet him: it would be such a great pleasure to push the man who had shot Charlie with the tranquilizer dart and later betrayed her in even more terrible fashion, to put his gun to his temple and pull the trigger. But he no longer wanted to meet Rainbird. He wanted no surprises of any kind. The numb spots on his face had shrunk to pinpricks, but they were still there-a reminder that if he had to overuse the push, he would very likely kill himself.
He only wanted things to go off smoothly.
His few things were packed all too soon, leaving him with nothing to do but sit and wait. The thought that he would be seeing his daughter again soon was like a small coal of warmth in his brain.
To him too one o'clock seemed an age away.
3
Rainbird didn’t sleep at all that night. He arrived back from Washington around five-thirty A.M… garaged his Cadillac, and sat at his kitchen table drinking cup after cup of coffee. He was waiting for a call from Andrews, and until that call came, he would not rest easy. It was still theoretically possible for Cap to have found out what he had done with the computer. McGee had messed up Cap Hollister pretty well, but it still did not pay to underestimate.
Around six-forty-five, the telephone rang. Rainbird set his coffee cup down, rose, went into the living room, and answered it. “Rainbird here.” “Rainbird? This is Dick Folsom at Andrews. Major Puckeridge’s aide.” “You woke me up, man,” Rainbird said. “I hope you catch crabs as big as orange crates.
That’s an old Indian curse.”
“You’ve been scrubbed,” Folsom said. “I guess you knew.”
“Yes, Cap called me himself last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Folsom said. “It’s standard operating procedure, that’s all.”
“Well, you operated in standard fashion. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Yeah. I envy you.” Rainbird uttered the obligatory chuckle and hung up. He went back into the kitchen, picked up his coffee cup, went to the window, looked out, saw nothing.
Floating dreamily through his mind was the Prayer for the Dead.
