Strangers (79 page)

“Dr. Bennell,” Leland said coldly, using the hard tone of voice and icy demeanor that always elicited quaverous obedience, “your handling of this security breach has been either criminally inept, or
you’re
the traitor we’re looking for. Now, hear me loud and clear: this time, we’re going to find the bastard who sent those Polaroid snapshots—no more broken lie detectors, no more botched interrogations—and we’re going to find out if he’s the one who teased Jack Twist into returning, and we’re going to come down on him so hard he’ll wish he’d been born a fly and spent his life in a stable sucking up horseshit.”

Utterly unruffled, Miles Bennell smiled and said, “Colonel, that was the best Richard Jaeckel impression I’ve ever seen, but entirely unnecessary. I’m as anxious as you to find the leak and plug it.”

Leland wanted to punch the son of a bitch. This was one reason he loathed Miles Bennell: The bastard could not be intimidated.

•

Calvin Sharkle lived on O’Bannon Lane in a pleasant middle-class residential neighborhood in Evanston. Father Wycazik had to stop twice at service stations to ask directions. When he got to the corner of O’Bannon and Scott Avenue, only two blocks from Sharkle’s address, he was turned back by policemen manning an emergency barricade formed by two black-and-white cruisers and one paramedic van. There were also television crews running around with minicams.

He also knew at once that the trouble on O’Bannon Lane was not merely coincidental. Something was happening at the Sharkle house.

In spite of temperatures in the mid-twenties and wind gusting to thirty miles an hour, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered outside the police barricade—on the sidewalks and on the lawns of the corner houses. Passing traffic on Scott Avenue was slowed by gawkers, and Stefan had to drive almost two blocks at a frustratingly slow pace before he found a parking space.

When he walked back to the crowd and became part of it, seeking information from the well-bundled onlookers, Father Wycazik found that they were for the most part a friendly and strangely excited group. But creepy, too. Not blatantly weird. In fact, they were ordinary people—except for their totally insensitive fascination with the tragedy unfolding before them, as if it were as legitimate a source of thrills as a football game.

It was definitely a tragedy, and one of a particularly horrible nature, which Father Wycazik discovered a minute after he joined the crowd and began to ask questions. A florid-faced, mustachioed man in a plaid hunting jacket and toboggan hat said, “Jesus, man, don’t you watch the goddamned
TV?” He was not the least restrained because he did not know he was talking to a priest; Stefan’s topcoat and scarf concealed all evidence of his holy office. “Christ, fella, that’s Sharkle down there. Sharkle the Shark, man. That’s what they’re callin’ him. Guy’s a dangerous loony. Been sealed up in his house there since yesterday, man. He shot him two of his neighbors and one cop already, and he’s got him two goddamn hostages who, if you ask me, got about as much chance as a fuckin’ cat at a Doberman convention.”

•

Tuesday morning, via Pacific Southwest Airlines, Parker Faine flew into San Francisco from Orange County, then caught a connecting West Air flight to Monterey. It was an hour’s trip up the California coast on PSA, a one-hour layover in San Francisco, and then only thirty-five minutes to Monterey. The journey seemed shorter because one of the other travelers, a pretty young woman, recognized his name, liked his paintings, and was in the mood to be enthralled by his burly charms.

In Monterey, at the small airport rental agency, he hired a vomit-green Ford Tempo. It was an offense to his refined sense of color.

The Tempo’s tempo was satisfyingly allegro on flat roads but a bit adagio on the hills. Nevertheless, he required less than half an hour to find the address Dom had given him for Gerald Salcoe, the man who had stayed at the Tranquility Motel with his wife and two daughters on the night of July 6, and who had thus far been unreachable by both phone and Western Union. It was a big Southern Colonial manor house, hideously out of place on the California coast, set on a prime half-acre, in the shade of massive pines, with enough elaborately tended shrubbery to employ a gardener one full day a week, including beds of impatiens that blazed with red and purple flowers even now, in January.

Parker swung the Tempo into the majestic circular driveway and parked in front of broad, flower-bordered steps that led up to a deep pillared veranda. In the shadows of the trees, there was sufficient gloom to require lights indoors, but he saw none at the front windows. All of the drapes were tightly shut, and the house had a vacant look.

He got out of the Tempo, hurried up the steps, and crossed the wide veranda, voicing his objection to the chilly air as he went: “Brrrrrrr.” The area’s usual morning fog had cleared from the airport, permitting landings, but it was still clinging to this part of the peninsula, bearding the pines, weaving tendrils between their trunks, muting the impatiens’ brilliant blooms. Winter in northern California was a more bracing season than in Laguna Beach, and with the added damp chill of fog, it was not at all to Parker’s taste. He had come dressed for it, however, in heavy
corduroy slacks, a green-plaid flannel shirt, a green pullover that mocked Izod-Lacoste by featuring a goofy-looking appliquéd armadillo on the breast instead of an alligator, and a three-quarter-length navy peacoat with sergeant’s stripes on one sleeve: quite an outfit, especially when accented by Day-Glo-orange running shoes. As he rang the doorbell, Parker looked down at himself and decided that maybe sometimes he dressed too eccentrically, even for an artist.

He rang the doorbell six times, waiting half a minute between each ring, but no one came.

Last night, when a man named Jack Twist had called him at eleven o’clock from a pay phone in Elko, claiming to have a message from Dom, and had asked him to go to a specific pay phone in Laguna for a callback in twenty minutes, Parker had still been working on a new and exciting painting that he had begun at three o’clock that afternoon. Nevertheless, deeply involved as he was with the work, he had hastened to the booth as directed. And he had agreed to the trip to Monterey without hesitation. The fact was that he had plunged into work as a means of taking his mind off Dom and the unfolding events in Elko County, for that was where he really wanted to be, neck-deep in the mystery. When Twist told him about Dom’s and the priest’s psychic demonstration—floating salt and pepper shakers, levitating chairs!—nothing short of World War III could have prevented Parker from going to Monterey. And now he was not going to be defeated by an empty house. Wherever the Salcoes were, he would find them, and the best place to start was with the neighbors.

Because of the half-acre lots and walls of intervening shrubbery, he could not easily walk next door. Back in the Tempo, as he put the car in gear, he glanced at the house again, and at first he thought he saw movement at one of the downstairs windows: a slightly parted drape falling back into place. He sat for a moment, staring, then decided the movement had been a trick of fog and shadows. He popped the handbrake and drove around the second half of the circular driveway, out to the street, delighted to be playing spy again.

•

Ernie and Dom parked the Jeep Cherokee at the end of the county road, and the pickup with the tinted windshield halted two hundred yards behind them. Perched on its high all-terrain tires, with goggle-eyed spotlights on its roof, it looked (Dom thought) like a big insect poised alertly on the down-sloping lane, ready to skitter toward a hidey-hole if it saw someone with a giant economy-size can of Raid. The driver did not get out, nor did the passenger, if there was one.

“Think there’s going to be trouble here?” Dom asked, getting out of the Cherokee and joining Ernie at the side of the road.

“If they’d meant trouble, they’d already have made it,” Ernie said. His breath steamed in the frigid air. “If they want to tag along and watch, that’s all right by me. To hell with them.”

They got two hunting rifles—a Winchester Model 94 carbine loaded with .32 Special cartridges, and a .30/06 Springfield—from the back of the Jeep Cherokee, handling the weapons conspicuously in the hope that the men in the pickup would be encouraged to remain peaceable by the realization that their quarry could fight back.

The mountain still rose on the western side of the lane, and forest still clothed those slopes. But the land that fell away to the east had become a broad treeless field, the northern end of the series of meadows that lay along the valley wall.

Although snow had not yet begun to fall, the wind was picking up. Dom was thankful for the winter clothes he had purchased in Reno, but he wished he had an insulated ski suit like Ernie was wearing. And a pair of those rugged lace-up boots instead of the flimsy zippered pair he now wore. Later today, Ginger and Faye would stop at a sporting-goods store in Elko with a list of gear needed for tonight’s operation, including suitable clothes for Dom and everyone else who did not already have them. At the moment, however, the insistent wind found entrance at Dom’s coat collar and at the unelasticized cuffs of his sleeves.

Leaving the Cherokee, he and Ernie went over the side of the road, down into the sloping meadow, continuing their inspection of the Thunder Hill perimeter on foot. The high, electrified chain-link fence with the barbed-wire overhang led out of the trees farther back; it ceased to parallel the northward course of the county road, turning east and down toward the valley floor. The snow in the meadow was ten inches deep, but still below the tops of their boots. They slogged two hundred yards to a point along the fence from which they could see, in the distance, the enormous steel blast doors set in the side of the valley wall.

Dom saw no signs of human or canine guards. The snow on the other side of the fence was not marked by footprints or pawprints, which meant no one walked the perimeter on a regular schedule.

“A place like this, they’re not going to be sloppy,” Ernie said. “So if there aren’t any foot patrols, there must be one hell of a lot of electronic security on the other side of this fence.”

Dom had been glancing toward the top of the meadow, a little worried that the men in the all-terrain truck might be up to something with the Cherokee. This time, when he looked back, he saw a man in dark clothes, starkly silhouetted against the snow. The guy wasn’t around the
Cherokee and seemed to have no interest in it, but he had come down from the edge of the county road, descending a few yards into the inclined meadow. He was standing up there, unmoving, maybe a hundred and eighty yards above Dom and Ernie, watching them.

Ernie noticed the observer, too. He tucked his Winchester under his right arm and lifted the binoculars he had been carrying on a strap around his neck. “He’s Army. At least that looks like a regulation Army greatcoat he’s wearing. Just watching us.”

“You’d think they’d be more discreet.”

“Can’t follow anyone discreetly, not in these wide-open spaces. Might as well be forthright. Besides, he wants us to see what he’s carrying, so we’ll know our rifles don’t worry him.”

“What do you mean?” Dom asked. “What’s he carrying?”

“A Belgian FN submachine gun. Damn fine weapon. It can fire up to six hundred rounds a minute.”

•

If Father Wycazik had watched television news, he would have heard about Calvin Sharkle last night, for the man had been a hot story for twenty-four hours. However, he’d stopped watching TV news years ago, for he’d decided that its relentless simplification of every story into stark black and white issues was intellectually corrupt and that its gleeful concentration on violence, sex, gloom, and despair was morally repellent. He also might have read about the tragedy on O’Bannon Lane on the front pages of this morning’s
Tribune
and
Sun-Times,
but he had left the rectory in such a hurry that he’d had no time for newspapers. Now he pieced the story together from information provided by those in the crowd behind the police barricades.

For months, Cal Sharkle had been acting…odd. Ordinarily cheerful and pleasant, a bachelor who lived alone and was well-liked by everyone on O’Bannon Lane, he’d become a brooder, dour and even grim. He told neighbors he had “a bad feeling about things,” and believed something “important and terrible is going to happen.” He read survivalist books and magazines, and talked about Armageddon. And he was plagued by vivid nightmares.

December first, he quit trucking, sold his rig, and told neighbors and relatives the end was imminent. He wanted to sell his house, buy remote property in the mountains, and build a retreat like those he had seen in the survivalist magazines. “But there isn’t time,” he told his sister, Nan Gilchrist. “So I’ll just prepare this house for a siege.” He didn’t know what was going to happen, did not understand the source of his own fear, though he said he was not concerned about nuclear war, Russian invasion,
economic collapse, or anything else that alarmed most survivalists. “I don’t know what…but something strange and horrible is going to happen,” he told his sister.

Mrs. Gilchrist made him see a doctor, who found him fit, suffering only from job-related stress. But after Christmas, Calvin’s previously garrulous nature gave way to a closed-mouth suspicion. During the first week of January, he had his phone disconnected, cryptically explaining: “Who knows how they’ll get at us when they come? Maybe they can do it over the phone.” He was unable or unwilling to identify “they.”

No one considered Cal really dangerous. He had been a peaceful, kind-hearted man all his life. In spite of his new eccentric behavior, there was no reason to think he would turn violent.

Then, yesterday morning at eight-thirty, Cal visited the Wilkersons, the family across the street, with whom he had once been close but from whom he had recently kept his distance. Edward Wilkerson told reporters that Cal said, “Listen, I can’t be selfish about this. I’m all prepared, and here you are defenseless. So when they come for us, Ed, it’ll be okay if you and your family hide out at my place.” When Wilkerson asked who “they” were, Cal said, “Well, I don’t know what they’ll look like, or what they’ll call themselves. But they’re going to do something bad to us, maybe turn us into zombies.” Cal Sharkle assured Wilkerson that he had plenty of guns and ammunition in his house and had taken steps to make a fortress of the place.