Breathless. Part 13

Pointing to a digital camera on the kitchen table, Grady said, "I took a slew of pictures before you got here."

"You're sure they're clear?"

"Yeah. I've reviewed them. They're great. But you haven't seen their eyes in the dark. I want you to slip through the door first, go out on the lawn, watch them come toward you."

When told to sit and stay, the wolfhound obeyed, although he grumbled.

As if they understood what was wanted, but more likely following the dog's example, Puzzle and Riddle sat flanking their new playmate.

Grady let Cammy out and closed the French door, watching as she descended the porch steps. She went into the yard, turned toward the house, and knelt on the gra.s.s.

"All right, gang. Last chance till morning."

When Grady opened the door and released Merlin from the sit-stay, the wolfhound and his posse raced out of the house.

Grady stepped onto the porch in time to see the dog bound past Cammy as she let out a wordless cry of astonishment at the spectacle of the other animals' color-changing, lantern eyes.

Puzzle and Riddle gamboled around her for a moment, giving her an opportunity to admire them, and then they sprinted after Merlin, toward the place where yard met meadow.

Remaining on her knees, Cammy said, "Oh, my G.o.d. Grady. Oh, my G.o.d. Their eyes!" Their eyes!"

She laughed so merrily, she sounded like a young girl. Grady sat on the porch steps, grinning at her.

When the animals returned from their toilet, Merlin sat beside his master. But in a playful mood, Puzzle and Riddle rejoined Cammy, swarming around her and over each other. They appeared to understand that they enchanted her, and they were in turn pleased by her admiration.

Their eyes l.u.s.tered, as though reflecting the memory of the most spectacular aurora borealis ever to grace the northern sky.

Grady had never before seen Cammy laugh with such joy. She had always seemed too cautious to delight unreservedly in anything.

Each man or woman was a mansion in a condition between grandness and disrepair, and even in a grand palace, sometimes a room existed in which no one but the resident would ever be welcome. Cammy's heart contained more than one forbidden room, contained an entire wing of doors locked with bolts of guilt or grief, or both. Grady sensed that she denied even herself the power to open them, to let in the light.

Nevertheless, she was his best friend. He had never known her to lie or to deceive by omission, or even to finesse a matter to her advantage. Parts of her life were off limits not because she wished to deceive but because, right or wrong, she judged the architecture of those rooms to be so inconsistent with the design of the rest of the structure that they added nothing to an understanding of it.

Grady valued her judgment, admired her commitment to animals, respected her standards as a veterinarian, cherished her kindness, which he sensed came from an experience of cruelty, and loved her because in this world of whiners and self-declared martyrs, Cammy Rivers never complained and never portrayed herself as a victim, though Grady suspected that she had more reason than most to claim that status.

Cammy in the night, on the lawn, playing with Puzzle and Riddle, astonished by their eyes, enraptured by the mystery of them, laughing with delight: Grady had never known a finer moment in his life.

Thirty-three.

In his hotel room in Las Vegas, Lamar Woolsey dreamed, but not of his lost wife, Estelle.

He dreamed of a casino so vast that he could not see as far as any wall. From the gold-leafed ceiling depended an infinite number of perfectly aligned chandeliers swagged with symmetrical ropes of crystal beads, each great lamp icicled with exactly the same number of crystal pendants in precisely the same arrangement.

Under this exquisitely ordered ceiling, he sat at a blackjack table with three other players: a one-eyed woman, a one-armed man, and a nine-year-old boy with one missing front tooth.

The woman wore a low-cut dress and repeatedly withdrew black hundred-dollar chips from between her ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Each time that she put them on the table, they transformed into black beetles and scurried across the green felt, much to the dealer's annoyance.

Every time the one-armed man received a card, he looked at it and in disgust threw it angrily at the dealer, who then dealt it to the boy. The boy didn't know the rules of the game and kept asking, "Has anyone seen my sister? Does anyone know where she's gone?"

The six-deck shoe contained ordinary playing cards but also tarot cards and picture cards from a children's game. Regardless of what Lamar drew, he won. A six of diamonds and a rabbit holding an umbrella: winner. The tarot hangman and an eight of hearts: winner.

When Lamar's winnings had grown sizeable, the one-eyed woman said, "There's the Pipp boy."

Glancing at the gap-toothed child who sat farther around the elliptical table, Lamar said, "That's not Marcus. Not him at all."

"Over there," she said, "at the roulette wheel."

The roulette game lay behind them, not in their line of sight. Turning on his stool, Lamar saw Marcus Pipp where she said he was.

Lamar left the table with his winnings in a chip rack, intending to give everything to Marcus. By the time he got to the roulette game, Marcus had gone.

The roulette table was one in an infinite row of them. Surveying the casino, Lamar saw Marcus four tables away and hurried toward him.

Rotors spun, b.a.l.l.s danced and clattered, and croupiers called the results, which suddenly were the same: "Double zero ... double zero ... double zero ... double zero. ..."

The dream didn't descend into a full-blown nightmare, but it became a drama of fleeting promise and enduring frustration. Table after table, Lamar pursued Marcus but couldn't reach him or catch his attention. Later, glimpsing him in the slot-machine maze, Lamar sought to intercept him without success. Later still, he spotted Marcus at a c.r.a.ps table, then at others, but Marcus drifted away.

Dead in reality, alive in the dream, Marcus Pipp was in both cases outward bound and beyond contact.

Thirty-four.

During the walk into town, Tom Bigger worked up an appet.i.te.

At a convenience store that offered prepackaged deli creations, he bought a submarine sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and a sixteen-ounce bottle of c.o.ke.

A couple of customers shied away from him. The clerk had served him before, however; she took some of his panhandled money and gave him change without saying a word to him, without glancing at his face.

In a nearby park, under an old iron lamppost that provided more atmosphere than light, Tom sat on a bench that looked out onto the street. He watched the pa.s.sing traffic as he ate.

Behind the bench rose an enormous phoenix palm. During the lulls in traffic, he could hear rats agitating one another in their nest high in the crown of the tree.

Tom didn't have much overhead, but panhandling alone couldn't pay for his needs. Every other month, he took a bus to the nearest city and, working at night, stole enough to cover his expenses.

Primarily, he burglarized suburban homes where a lack of lights and a few days' of newspapers scattered on the driveway suggested he would not risk coming face-to-face with a homeowner.

If he found a likely target walking alone on a lonely street, he robbed him at gunpoint. Tom's face and the pistol turned even strapping young men into situational pacifists.

The gun wasn't loaded. He didn't trust himself with cartridges.

He never worried that in a frenzy of self-hatred he might kill himself. Suicide required either more courage than he possessed or more despair than afflicted him.

His hatred was directed inward, his rage outward. With bullets in the weapon, he would sooner or later kill somebody.

From experience, he knew that once he indulged in a vice, that indulgence became a habit, then an obsession. Murder would be no less addictive than tequila or weed, or the other drugs that he consumed so recklessly when he could get them.

He was a lot of things, none of them good. He dreaded adding murderer murderer to the list of words that described him. to the list of words that described him.

As he ate the sandwich, his mind reeled back more than once to the incident in the bluff-top rest area.

Initially, he had been astonished. Astonishment turned to shock that rendered him bewildered and emotionally numb. On the walk from his cave to the town, numbness relented to a creeping disquiet.

Watching the pa.s.sing traffic, Tom saw a b.u.mper sticker that proclaimed I STOP SUDDENLY JUST FOR THE h.e.l.l OF IT I STOP SUDDENLY JUST FOR THE h.e.l.l OF IT.

Across the street, a multiplex was playing a movie about the end of the world.

In memory, he heard a fragment of what at the time had seemed to be a perpetual argument, conflict without end.

"Why are you doing this, Tommy?"

"Just for the h.e.l.l of it."

"You're throwing away your life, your future."

"There isn't a future. It's the end of the world."

"It isn't the end of the world."

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like you are the ones destroying it."

"How can you talk to me like that?"

"How can you be the s.h.i.t you are?"

The fitful breeze brought a handbill to his feet. In the wan lamplight he saw that it was for a restaurant called Magic Pizza.

After a moment of consideration, he carried the handbill, the sandwich wrapper, the empty bag of potato chips, and the half-empty bottle of c.o.ke to the nearest trash can and threw everything away.

He needed a joint of sinsemilla. Local authorities were tolerant of the discreet use of pot. He took the tin of hand-rolleds from his backpack, fished a joint from the supply, and put the tin away.

Deeper in the park, he found a more secluded bench.

He had a butane lighter. He struck the flame but didn't light the joint.

If he smoked one, he would smoke a second, perhaps a third. He would wash away the pot taste with tequila. In the morning, he would wake up behind a screen of bushes, with dirt matted in his beard stubble and spiders in his hair.

The creeping disquiet inspired by the incident on the bluff was growing into a motivating apprehension.

He put away the lighter. Instead of returning the joint to the stash in the tin, he shredded it in his fingers and scattered it on the breeze.

This action so surprised him that for a moment he seined the air with his fingers, trying to recapture the debris that he'd cast away an instant earlier.

Already, the disquiet that thickened into apprehension was further thickening into dread.

While he'd been eating a late dinner on the first bench, he was given signs from which he deduced where he must go. He suspected that time was running out for him to do what he must do.

The thought of riding for three hours in a bus chilled him. If this weight of dread became too heavy, he would feel oppressed in a bus. Claustrophobia would overwhelm him.

Intuition told him to begin the journey on foot. He set out for the coastal highway.

Thirty-five.

After watching Merlin drink from his large water bowl, Puzzle and Riddle attended Grady's preparations with interest as he chose two bowls from a cabinet and filled each with cold water from the kitchen tap.

As she extracted the memory stick from Grady's camera and tucked it in a side compartment of her medical bag to take home, Cammy said, "Neither of us seems to want to speculate."

"About what?"

"About what do you think?"

"You said earlier-you do medicine, you don't do theory."

"Speculation isn't theory," she said. "It's not even up to the level of hypothesis. It's just blue-skying. It's what-if, if-maybe, could-it-be stuff."

"I don't want to speculate about them."

"That's what I just said. Neither of us wants to speculate."

"All right, then. Good. We're agreed."

"But why do you think that is?"

He said, "I don't do self-a.n.a.lysis."

She watched him put the two bowls of water on the floor.