Mr. X (63 page)

Looking for a way out, I bent toward the windshield. A massive figure was standing under a street lamp. The warrior in the red and green dashiki whom I had encountered on the day my mother died turned his head to watch me flash by.

The dazzle filled the rearview mirror. I slammed the brake pedal. The Taurus’s back end spun to the right, and I cranked the wheel the same way. The landscape revolved around me. The pistol sailed off the passenger seat. When the car stopped moving, I was looking into the lights of the pickup. I released the brake and stamped on the accelerator. The car jolted forward, shuddered, stalled. I smelled burning rubber and frying circuits. The dashboard lights went off.

The doors of the pickup opened on a burst of hoarse laughter. Joe Staggers jumped out of the cab. A heavyset man lumbered toward me from the other side of the truck. He was carrying a
baseball bat. Staggers hitched up his belt. “Looks like Mr. Dunstan’s car quit on him. Isn’t that a damn shame?”

His friend laughed,
yuk, yuk, yuk
.

I turned the key, and the Taurus muttered. Joe Staggers slapped its hood. “Hey, don’t you want to talk to us?”

Yuk, yuk, yuk
.

I groped under the dash without touching anything but the floor mat.

Joe Staggers’s face filled the window like a Halloween pumpkin. “Coming out to play?” He reached for the door handle.

I was going to have to fight two men. No matter how well I fought, they were going to kill me. I was minutes from a miserable, painful death. Suddenly, Aunt Joy’s voice spoke to me with absolute clarity.
He used to say he
ate
time
.

You can use time, if you’re able
.

My stomach knotted. I closed my eyes and dropped into darkness.

When I opened my eyes again, I knew that I had eaten time. I was still in the car. Staggers had disappeared. The lights of his pickup were gone. Nothing around me resembled the Pine Street I had left. Tar-paper shacks grew from a muddy field ending at a wooden fence with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Far back from the road, flames from a trash barrel in front of a ramshackle wooden structure illuminated a dozen men in clothing like layers of dried mud. It could have been a photograph from the Depression. My head cleared enough for me to realize that it
was
the Depression. I had fallen through nearly sixty years.

At first cautiously, then with a kind of surly boldness, the men moved toward me. Suspicion and hostility came from them like an odor.

I turned the key. The ignition growled.

One of them shouted, “You spyin’ on us, Fancy Dan? What’s that you’re drivin’?”

Uncertain, intimidated, they gathered at the side of the road. The man who had shouted drew a knife from his pocket and stepped forward. The others shuffled along behind him.

I tried to remember what I had done a moment before. Footsteps plodded toward me. I thought of Joe Staggers; I remembered walking over a grass carpet into the wreckage on New Providence Road. For the first time, I grasped the means I had
used twice before. I wish I could describe it, but it would be like trying to explain a color. The bolt once more passed through my forehead. I ate time, although it felt as though I were the one being eaten.

Headlights streamed through the darkness, and someone yelped. I swallowed vomit.

Staggers was beside his pickup, his brutal face turned to look over his shoulder. Four feet away, Yuk Yuk stared at me in utter terror.

“Get in the truck, Shorty,” Staggers ordered. Yuk Yuk let go of the bat and blundered around the front of the truck.

I twisted the key. The dash lights glowed, and the engine came to life.

89

Numbly, I went through the usual night-time rituals and got into bed. I would never understand what was happening to me. All the familiar definitions had disappeared. I would never be able to go back to writing computer programs, because I was no longer the person who had done that. I lost myself in a mystery novel until I turned off the light.

At 6:00
A.M.,
I woke damp with sweat and forced myself out of bed, showered, and pulled on a blue polo shirt and my last pair of fresh jeans. I picked up the Beretta. Six-thirty
A.M.
was a ridiculous hour to wear a pistol. I put it down again. Joe Staggers had been humiliated, and he was going to come after me again, but not in the daytime. I stashed the gun behind the minibar and went to a diner for scrambled eggs and coffee.

On my way to the pawnshop, I bought a copy of the
Echo
at a newsstand. The mayor of Edgerton had introduced his good friend Stewart Hatch to a gathering of the local press. The mayor’s good friend had announced the construction of an arts center and convention facility on the banks of the Mississippi immediately north of St. Ann’s Community Hospital, at the cost of no more than half of the hospital’s extensive parking space.

A smaller headline at the bottom of the front page reported
MURDER IN OLD TOWN.
Cassandra Little, thirty-two, a bartender at the Speedway Lounge, had been brutally slain in her Low Street apartment. When she failed to come to work, the Speedway’s manager, Bruce McMicken, had gone to Little’s residence and discovered her body. A Police Department source speculated that Ms. Little had surprised a burglar.

On Chester Street, charred beams and incinerated wreckage had settled into the basement of the rooming house. The walls on either side looked like burnt toast.

I turned into Lanyard Street. Toby was probably still in bed. I let myself in and spent about twenty minutes straightening the shelves and sweeping the floor. Then I arranged the papers on the counter and discovered two slips tucked under a paperweight. I took them toward the office and saw light shining through the crack at the bottom of the door.

“I wondered where you were,” I said, and went in. Toby Kraft looked at me moodily from behind his desk. “Didn’t you …” My question vaporized.

From the neck down, a sheet of blood painted his chest. The white filaments drifting across the top of his head made his hair look like a wig. His eyes were colored stones, and his cottage-cheese face looked grumpy. For a moment, I thought Toby was going to jump up and laugh at my shock. I took a step forward and saw the gash in his neck. Abruptly, the smell of blood bloomed in the air.

Robert?

I wanted to walk out and keep traveling until I got somewhere only the waiters and street vendors spoke English. Then I went back into the shop and called the police.

The moment I hung up, I remembered the lawyer with the funny name and dug his card out of my wallet.

C. Clayton Creech said, “Murdered? How?”

“Someone cut his throat.”

“Is the safe closed?”

“Yes.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Yes.”

“Do two things right now. Take the ledger out of his bottom desk drawer and hide it in the storeroom. When you’re done, I’ll tell you the second.”

His dry, unemphatic voice was without any resonance. I thought this was not the first time C. Clayton Creech had been told of the murder of a client. I tried not to look at Toby’s body when I took the ledger out of the drawer, and after I wedged it between two boxes in the storeroom, I returned to the telephone.

“We are entering into an agreement, Mr. Dunstan. For the sum of one dollar, I have been hired as your legal representative. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I don’t need a legal representative,” I said.

“You will. In accordance with Mr. Kraft’s wishes, I want to meet you and the other surviving members of his late wife’s family at two o’clock this afternoon. At that time, you will understand why I prefer not to speak of this matter in the presence of the police. Keep your trap shut until I get there.”

I put down the receiver and waited for Lieutenant Rowley.

90

A police car followed by a dark blue sedan came whooping down Lanyard Street and pulled up in front of the shop. Two men in uniforms left the squad car and watched Rowley climb out of the sedan. He charged up to the door, saw me coming, and banged his fist against the glass. Rowley kept on banging until I opened up.

“What the hell are you doing here, Dunstan?”

“I was helping out in the shop. This is my second day.”

“You found the body?”

“You know I did. I gave my name when I called headquarters.”

Rowley pointed at one of the cops. “Nelson, get the preliminaries from Mr. Dunstan and take him to headquarters. Where’s the body?”

“Back there,” I said.

Rowley stormed into the office. Toby seemed to be looking at me, and I had the crazy impulse to go in and straighten out his hair. Two more police cars swung in front of the shop. Captain
Mullan and a detective I had not seen before got out of the second one.

Mullan gave me an arctic glance before going into the office. The detective followed him. I heard Mullan say, “You know, I don’t think I really believe this shit.”

Two more squad cars and an ambulance screeched up in front of the building. Suddenly, the shop was filled with policemen. Officer Nelson flipped to a clean page of his notebook.

Mullan emerged from the office with Rowley treading on his heels. When Rowley saw the other detective, his jaw snapped shut.

“I thought this was me,” said the detective.

“What’s Oster doing here?”

Mullan’s expression was completely disingenuous. “Don’t you have the Little case?”

“You know I do.”

“Then go back to headquarters, Lieutenant. Detective Oster’s getting this one.”

All the policemen in the shop were staring at Rowley. “Fine,” he said. A trace of red came into his cheeks. “But Dunstan’s already—”

“Already what, Lieutenant?”

Every head in the room turned to a gaunt, pale man in a gray suit who seemed to have appeared at my side through some magical agency, as if from a burst of smoke. He had thin, colorless hair, a narrow, deeply lined face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a mouth like a mail slot. I recognized his flat, dry voice. “Please, Lieutenant, go on.”

“Just what we need,” Rowley said. “C. Clayton Creech.”