Later

24

I can’t really say if he was as bad as the Central Park man, that was a long time ago. He could have been worse. Once you’ve seen what can happen to a human body that’s suffered an act of violence—accident, suicide, murder—maybe it doesn’t even matter. Kenneth Therriault, alias Thumper, was bad, okay? Really bad.

There were benches on either side of the grocery’s door, so people could eat the snacks they bought, I suppose. Therriault was sitting on one of them with his hands on the thighs of his khaki pants. People were passing by, headed for whatever they were headed for. A black kid with a skateboard under his arm went into the store. A lady came out with a steaming paper cup of coffee. Neither of them glanced at the bench where Therriault was sitting.

He must have been right-handed, because that side of his head didn’t look too bad. There was a hole in his temple, maybe the size of a dime, maybe a little smaller, surrounded by a dark corona that was either bruising or gunpowder. Probably gunpowder. I doubt if his body had time to muster enough blood to make a bruise.

The real damage was on the left, where the bullet exited. The hole on that side was almost as big as a dessert plate and surrounded by irregular fangs of bone. The flesh on his head was swelled, like from a gigantic infection. His left eye had been yanked sideways and bulged from its socket. Worst of all, gray stuff had dripped down his cheek. That was his brain.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “Just keep going.” The smell of puke was strong in my nose and the taste of it was in my mouth, all slimy. “Please, Liz, I can’t.”

She swerved to the curb in front of a fire hydrant near the end of the block instead. “You have to. And I have to. Sorry, Champ, but we have to know. Now pull yourself together so people don’t stare at us and think I’ve been abusing you.”

But you are, I thought. And you won’t stop until you get what you want.

The taste in my mouth was the ravioli I’d eaten in the school caff. As soon as I realized that I opened the door, leaned out, and puked some more. Like on the day of the Central Park man, when I never made it to Lily’s birthday party at fancy-shmancy Wave Hill. That was déjà vu I could have done without.

“Champ? Champ!”

I turned to her and she was holding out a wad of Kleenex (show me a woman without Kleenex in her purse and I’ll show you no one at all). “Wipe your mouth and then get out of the car. Try to look normal. Let’s get this done.”

I could see she meant it—we weren’t going to leave until she had what she wanted. Man up, I thought. I can do this. I have to, because lives are at stake.

I wiped my mouth and got out. Liz put her little sign on the dashboard—the police version of Get Out of Jail Free—and came around to where I was standing on the sidewalk, staring into a laundromat at a woman folding clothes. That wasn’t very interesting, but at least it kept me from looking at the ruined man up the street. For the time being, anyway. Soon I’d have to. Worse—oh God—I’d have to talk to him. If he even could talk.

I held out my hand without thinking. Thirteen was probably too old to be holding hands with a woman the people passing by would assume was my mother (if they bothered thinking about us at all), but when she took it, I was glad. Glad as hell.

We started back to the store. I wished we’d had miles to walk, but it was only half a block.

“Where is he, exactly?” she asked in a low voice.

I risked a look to make sure he hadn’t moved. Nope, he was still on the bench, and now I could look directly into the crater where there had once been thoughts. His ear was still on, but it was crooked and I found myself remembering a Mr. Potato Head I’d had when I was four or five. My stomach clenched again.

“Get it together, Champ.”

“Don’t call me that anymore,” I managed to say. “I hate it.”

“Duly noted. Where is he?”

“Sitting on the bench.”

“The one on this side of the door, or—”

“This side, yeah.”

I was looking at him again, we were close now so I couldn’t help it, and I saw an interesting thing. A man came out of the store with a newspaper under his arm and a hot dog in one hand. The hot dog was in one of those foil bags that’s supposed to keep them hot (believe that and you’ll believe the moon is made of green cheese). He started to sit down on the other bench, already pulling his hot dog out of the bag. Then he stopped, looked either at me and Liz or the other bench, and walked on down the block to eat his pup somewhere else. He didn’t see Therriault—he would have run if he had, most likely screaming his head off—but I think he felt him. No, I don’t just think it, I know it. I wish I’d paid more attention at the time, but I was upset, as I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.

Therriault turned his head. It was a relief because the move hid the worst of the exit wound. It wasn’t a relief because his face was normal on one side and all bloated out of shape on the other, like that guy Two-Face in the Batman comics. Worst of all, now he was looking at me.

I see them and they know I do. It’s always been that way.

“Ask him where the bomb is,” Liz said. She was speaking from the corner of her mouth, like a spy in a comedy.

A woman with a baby in a Papoose carrier came up the sidewalk. She gave me a distrustful glance, maybe because I looked funny or maybe because I smelled of puke. Maybe both. I was past the point of caring. All I wanted was to do what Liz Dutton had brought me here to do, then get the fuck out. I waited until the woman with the baby went inside.

“Where’s the bomb, Mr. Therriault? The last bomb?”

At first he didn’t reply and I was thinking okay, his brains are blown out, he’s here but he can’t talk, end of story. Then he spoke up. The words didn’t exactly match the movements of his mouth and it came to me that he was talking from somewhere else. Like on a time-delay from hell. That scared the shit out of me. If I’d known that was when something awful came into him and took him over, it would have been even worse. But do I know that? Like for sure? No, but I almost know it.

“I don’t want to tell you.”

That stunned me to silence. I had never gotten such a reply from a dead person before. True, my experience was limited, but up until then I would have said they had to tell you the truth first time, every time.

“What did he say?” Liz asked. Still talking from the corner of her mouth.

I ignored her and spoke to Therriault again. Since there was no one around, I spoke louder, enunciating every word the way you would for a person who was deaf or only had a shaky grasp on English. “Where… is… the last… bomb?”

I also would have said that the dead can’t feel pain, that they are beyond it, and Therriault certainly did not seem to be suffering from the cataclysmic self-inflicted wound in his head, but now his half-bloated face twisted as if I were burning him or stabbing him in the belly instead of just asking him a question.

“Don’t want to tell you!”

“What did he—” Liz began again, but then the lady with the baby came back out. She had a lottery ticket. The baby in the Papoose had a Kit-Kat finger which he was smearing all over his face. Then he looked at the bench where Therriault was sitting and started crying. The mom must have thought her kid was looking at me, because she gave me another glance, mega distrustful this time, and hurried on her way.

“Champ… Jamie, I mean…”

“Shut up,” I said. Then, because my mother would have hated me talking to any grownup like that, “Please.”

I looked back to Therriault. His grimace of pain made his ruined face look more ruined than ever, and all at once I decided I didn’t care. He had maimed enough people to fill a hospital ward, he had killed people, and if the note he’d pinned to his shirt wasn’t a lie, he had died trying to kill even more. I decided I hoped he was suffering.

“Where… is it… you… motherfucker?”

He clasped his hands around his middle, bent over like he had cramps, groaned. Then he gave it up. “King Kullen. The King Kullen Supermarket in Eastport.”

“Why?”

“Seemed right to finish where I started,” he said, and drew a circle in the air with one finger. “Complete the circle.”

“No, why do it at all? Why set all those bombs?”

He smiled, and the way it kind of squelched the bloated side of his face? I still see that, and I’ll never be able to unsee it.

“Because,” he said.

“Because what?”

“Because I felt like it,” he said.