Later

62

“Ask him!” She was digging into my shoulder and breathing in my face. Neither was pleasant, but her breath was worse.

“Let go of me and I will.”

I walked slowly toward Marsden. Liz followed close behind. I could feel her, looming.

I stopped about five feet away. “Where are the pills?”

He replied without hesitation, talking as all of them did—with the exception of Therriault, that was—as if it didn’t really matter. And why would it? He didn’t need pills anymore, not where he was and not where he was going. Assuming he was going anywhere.

“Some are on the table beside my bed, but most are in the medicine cabinet. Topomax, Marinox, Inderal, Pepcid, Flomax…” Plus half a dozen more. Droning them off like a shopping list.

“What did he—”

“Be quiet,” I said. For the moment I was in charge, although I knew that wouldn’t last long. Would I be in charge if I called the thing inhabiting Therriault? That I didn’t know. “I asked the wrong question.”

I turned to look at her.

“I can ask the right one, but first you have to promise you’re going to let me go once you get what you came for.”

“Of course I am, Jamie,” she said, and I knew she was lying. I’m not sure exactly how I knew, there was nothing logical about it, but it wasn’t pure intuition. I think it had to do with the way her eyes shifted away from mine when she used my name.

I knew then I’d have to whistle.

Donald Marsden was still standing by the door of his library. I wondered briefly if he actually read the books in there, or if they were just for show. “She doesn’t want your prescription stuff, she wants the Oxy. Where is it?”

What happened next had happened just once before. When I asked Therriault where he’d planted his last bomb. Marsden’s words stopped matching the movements of his mouth, as if he was struggling against the imperative to answer. “I don’t want to tell you.”

Exactly what Therriault had said.

“Jamie! What—”

“Be quiet, I said! Give me a chance!” Then, to him: “Where is the Oxy?”

When pressed, Therriault had looked like he was in pain, and I think—don’t know but think—that’s when the deadlight-thing came in. Marsden didn’t look to be in physical pain, but something emotional was going on there even though he was dead. He put his hands over his face like a child who’s done something wrong and said, “Panic room.”

“What do you mean? What’s a panic room?”

“It’s a place to go in case of a break-in.” The emotion was gone, fast as it had come. Marsden was back to his shopping-list drone. “I have enemies. She was one. I just didn’t know it.”

“Ask him where it is!” Liz said.

I was pretty sure I knew that, but I asked, anyway. He pointed into the library.

“It’s a secret room,” I said, but since that wasn’t a question, he made no response. “Is it a secret room?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

He went into the library, which was now shadowy. Dead people aren’t ghosts, exactly, but as he went into that dimness, he sure looked like one. Liz had to feel around for the switch that turned on the overhead and more flambeaux, suggesting to me that she’d never spent any time in there, even though she was a reader. How many times had she actually been in this house? Maybe once or twice, maybe never. Maybe she only knew it from pictures and very careful questions to people who had been there.

Marsden pointed to a shelf of books. Because Liz couldn’t see him, I copied his gesture and said, “That one.”

She went to it and pulled. I might have run right then, except she pulled me along with her. She was stoned and redlining with excitement, but she still had at least some of her cop instincts. She yanked on several shelves with her free hand, but nothing happened. She cursed and turned to me.

To forestall another shaking or arm-twisting, I asked Mars-den the obvious question. “Is there a catch that opens it?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he saying, Jamie? Goddam it, what’s he saying?”

Besides being scary as fuck, she was driving me crazy with her questions. She had forgotten to wipe her nose and now fresh blood was running over her upper lip, making her look like one of Bram Stoker’s vampires. Which in my opinion she sort of was.

“Give me a chance, Liz.” Then to Marsden: “Where’s the catch?”

“Top shelf, on the right,” Marsden said.

I told Liz. She stood on her toes, fumbled some more, and then there was a click. This time when she pulled, the bookcase swung out on hidden hinges, revealing a steel door, another keypad, and another small red light above the numbers. Liz didn’t have to tell me what to ask next.

“What’s the code?”

Once again he raised his hands and covered his eyes, that childish gesture that says If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. It was a sad gesture, but I couldn’t afford to be touched by it, and not just because he was a drug baron whose product had undoubtedly killed hundreds, maybe even thousands of people, and hooked thousands more. I had enough problems of my own.

“What… is… the… code?” Enunciating each word, as I had with Therriault. This was different, but it was also the same.

He told me. He had to.

“73612,” I said.

She punched in the numbers, still holding onto my arm. I almost expected a thump and a hiss, like an airlock opening in a science fiction movie, but the only thing that happened was the red light turning green. There was no handle or doorknob, so Liz pushed on the door and it swung open. The room inside was as black as a black cat’s asshole.

“Ask him where the light switches are.”

I did, and Marsden said, “There aren’t any.” He had dropped his hands again. His voice was already starting to fade. At that moment I thought maybe he was going so fast because he’d been murdered instead of dying a natural death or having an accident. Later on I changed my mind. I think he wanted to be gone before we found out what was in there.

“Try just stepping inside,” I said.

She took a tentative step into the dark, never losing her hold on me, and overhead fluorescents came on. The room was stark. On the far side was an icebox (Professor Burkett’s voice came back to me), a hotplate, and a microwave. To the left and right were shelves stacked with cheap canned food, stuff like Spam and Dinty Moore Beef Stew and King Oscar sardines. There were also pouches containing more food (later I found out those were what the army calls MREs, meals ready to eat), and sixpacks of water and beer. There was a landline telefungus on one of the lower shelves. In the middle of the room was a plain wooden table. There was a desktop computer on it, a printer, a thick folder, and a zippered shaving bag.

“Where’s the Oxy?”

I asked. “He says they’re in the dopp kit, whatever that is.”

She seized the shaving bag, unzipped it, and turned it over. A bunch of pill bottles fell out, along with two or three small packets done up in Saran Wrap. Not exactly a treasure trove. She yelled, “What the fuck is this?”

I barely heard her. I had flipped open the folder beside the computer, for no other reason than it was there, and I was in shock. At first it was like I didn’t even know what I was seeing, but of course I did. And I knew why Marsden hadn’t wanted us to come in here, and why he could feel shame even though he was dead. It had nothing to do with drugs. I wondered if the woman I was looking at had the same ball-gag in her mouth. Poetic justice if she did.

“Liz,” I said. My lips felt numb, like I’d gotten a shot of Novocain at the dentist.

“Is this all?” she was shouting. “Don’t you fucking dare tell me this is all!” She twisted open one of the prescription bottles and dumped out the contents. There were maybe two dozen pills. “This isn’t even Oxy, these are fucking Darvons!”

She had let go of me and I could have run right then, but I never even thought of it. Even the thought of whistling for Therriault had left my mind. “Liz,” I said again.

She paid no attention. She was opening the bottles, one after the other. Different kinds of pills, but not a lot of them in any of the bottles. She was staring at some of the blue ones. “Roxies, okay, but this isn’t even a dozen! Ask him where the rest are!”

“Liz, look at this.” It was my voice, but seeming to come from far away.

“I said ask him—” She swung back and stopped, looking at what I was looking at.

It was a glossy photograph topping a thin stack of other glossy photographs. There were three people in it: two men and a woman. One of the men was Marsden. He wasn’t even wearing his boxers. The other man was also naked. They were doing things to the woman with the gag in her mouth. I don’t want to say, only that Marsden had a little blowtorch and the other man had one of those double-pronged meat forks.

“Shit,” she whispered. “Oh, shit.” She flipped through some more. They were unspeakable. She closed the folder. “It’s her.”

“Who?”

“Maddie. His wife. Guess she didn’t run off after all.”

Marsden was still outside in the library, but looking away from us. The back of his head was a ruin, like the left side of Therriault’s had been, but I barely noticed. There are worse things than bullet wounds, a little something I found out that evening.

“They tortured her to death,” I said.

“Yes, and had fun while they were doing it. Look at those big smiles. You still sorry I killed him?”

“You didn’t kill him because of what he did to his wife,” I said. “You didn’t know about that. You killed him because of the dope.”

She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, and to her it probably didn’t. She looked out of the panic room, where he came to look at his awful pictures, and across the library to the upstairs hall. “Is he still there?”

“Yes. In the doorway.”

“At first he said there weren’t any pills, but I knew he was lying. Then he said there were a lot. A lot!”

“Maybe he was lying when he said that. He could, because he wasn’t dead yet.”

“But he told you they were in the panic room! He was already dead then!”

“He didn’t say how many.” I asked Marsden, “That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all,” he said. His voice was starting to drift.

“You told her you had a lot!”

He shrugged his bloody shoulders. “As long as she believed I had what she wanted, I thought she’d keep me alive.”

“But that tip she heard about your getting a big private shipment—”

“Just bullshit,” he said. “There’s a lot of bullshit in this business. People say all sorts of shit just to hear themselves talk.”

Liz shook her head when I told her what he’d said, not believing it. Not wanting to believe it because if she did, it meant all her west coast plans fell down. It meant she’d been conned.

“He’s hiding something,” she insisted. “Somehow. Somewhere. Ask him again where the rest of them are.”

I opened my mouth to say that if there were more he would have told me already. Then—probably because the terrible pictures had slapped a dazed part of me awake—I had an idea. Maybe I could do some conning of my own, because she was certainly ready to be conned. If it worked, I might be able to get away from her without whistling up a demon.

She grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Ask him, I said!”

So I did. “Where’s the rest of the dope, Mr. Marsden?”

“I told you, that’s all there is.” His voice was fading, fading. “I keep a few on hand for Maria, but she’s in the Bahamas. Bimini.”

“Oh, okay. That’s more like it.” I pointed to the shelves of canned goods. “See the cans of spaghetti on the top shelf?” There was no way she could miss them, there had to be at least thirty. Donnie Bigs must have really loved his Franco-American. “He said he hid some in those—not Oxy, they’re something else.”

She could have dragged me with her, but I was thinking there was a good chance she’d be too eager, and I was right. She ran to the shelves of canned goods. I waited until she was standing on her tiptoes and reaching up. Then I bolted out of the panic room and across the library. I wish I’d remembered to shut the door, but I didn’t. Marsden was standing there and he looked solid, but I ran right through him. There was a moment of freezing cold, and my mouth filled with an oily taste I think was pepperoni. Then I was sprinting for the stairs.

There was a clatter of falling cans from behind me. “Get back here, Jamie! Get back!”

She came after me. I could hear her. I made it to where those stairs swooped down, and looked over my shoulder. That was a mistake. I tripped. Out of other options, I pursed my lips to whistle, but I couldn’t do anything but huff air. My mouth and lips were too dry. So I screamed instead.

“THERRIAULT!”

I started to crawl down the stairs headfirst with my hair in my eyes, but she grabbed my ankle.

“THERRIAULT, HELP ME! GET HER OFF ME!”

Suddenly everything—not just the balcony, not just the stairs, but all of the space above the great room and the conversation pit—filled with white light. I was looking back at Liz when it happened, and I squinted against the glare, all but blinded. It was coming from that tall mirror, and more was pouring out of the mirror on the other side of the balcony.

Liz’s grip loosened. I grabbed one of the slate stairs and yanked on it as hard as I could. Down I went on my belly, like a kid on the world’s bumpiest toboggan ride. I came to a stop about a quarter of the way down. Behind me, Liz was shrieking. I looked between my arm and my side, because of my position seeing her upside down. She was standing in front of the mirror. I don’t know exactly what she saw, and that’s good, because I might never have slept again. The light was enough—that brilliant no-color light that came glaring out of the mirror like a solar flare.

The deadlight.

Then I saw—I think I saw—a hand come out of the mirror and seize Liz by the neck. It yanked her against the glass and I heard it crack. She continued to shriek.

All the lights went out.

It was still the tag-end of dusk so it wasn’t pitch dark in the house, but it was getting close. The room below me was a well of shadows. Behind me, at the top of the curving staircase, Liz was shrieking and shrieking. I used the smooth glass railing to pull myself to my feet and managed to stumble my way down to the living room without falling.

Behind me, Liz stopped shrieking and began to laugh. I turned and saw her running down the stairs, just a dark shape laughing like the Joker in a Batman cartoon. She was going way too fast, and not looking where she was going. She weaved from side to side, bouncing off the railings, looking back over her shoulder at the mirror where the light was now fading away, like the filament in an old-fashioned light bulb when you turn it off.

“Liz, look out!”

I yelled that even though the only thing in the world I wanted was to get away from her. The warning was pure instinct, and it did no good. She overbalanced, fell forward, hit the stairs, tumbled, hit the stairs again, did another somersault, then slid all the way to the bottom. She went on laughing the first time she hit but stopped the second time. Like she was a radio and someone had turned her off. She lay face-up at the foot of the stairs with her head cocked, her nose bent sideways, one arm all the way up behind her to her neck, and her eyes staring off into the gloom.

“Liz?”

Nothing.

“Liz, are you okay?”

What a stupid question, and why did I care? That one I can answer. I wanted her to be alive because something was behind me. I didn’t hear it but I knew it was there.

I knelt next to her and held a hand to her bloody mouth. There was no breath on my palm. Her eyes did not blink. She was dead. I got up, turned, and saw exactly what I expected: Liz standing there in her unzipped duffle coat and bloodstained sweatshirt. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking over my shoulder. She raised one of her hands and pointed, reminding me even in that terrible moment of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Scrooge’s tombstone.

Kenneth Therriault—what remained of him, at least—was coming down the stairs.