The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (17 page)

McCabe hacked.

"My God," Ryerson breathed again.

McCabe said, "You're being cryptic, Rye. Don't be cryptic—you're always so fucking cryptic!"

But Ryerson wasn't listening to him. Ryerson was listening to a voice from within himself, a voice he couldn't resist.

Doug Miller was not a welcome sight on Jack Youngman's doorstep. Youngman thought he was noble enough to put up with Miller on Sundays, at the golf course—which, after all, was in a good cause: winning—and also during working hours. But not while he was between shifts. And not while he was trying to catch some time alone with the woman from next door, who'd only recently agreed to come into his house without her teen-age daughter or twenty-five-year-old son in tow as a freaking chaperone.

He growled at Miller, "What the hell you
doin
' here? Christ—" He stopped, noticed that Miller looked a bit on edge, a little nervous, that he was avoiding Youngman's gaze. "What's your problem, Miller?
Jees
—you got ants in your pants, or what?”

“Can I come in, Jack?"

"Come
in
?! Shit, no, I got a woman in here—"

"Jack, it's important. I know . . ." He hesitated. A sly grin spread over his mouth. He finished, "I know what you've been doing, Jack."

The fucking blood in the trunk!
Youngman thought. He said, "You don't know shit, Miller," but he could hear that his voice was wavering and uncertain, and he knew that Miller could hear it, too. He took a breath. "Listen, Miller, let me get rid of the woman, okay? She doesn't need to know anything—"

"Whatever," Miller said. He suddenly seemed more at ease, less nervous; he met Youngman's gaze. "You do what you have to do, Jack. Then we'll talk."

"Yeah," said Youngman. "Wait right here." And he closed the door. A minute later he opened it again, just wide enough for Miller to squeeze through. "Okay, come in." Miller went in, was led into the small but scrupulously neat kitchen, and was told to sit down. He did.

"I'd like some coffee, Jack," he said matter-of-factly.

Youngman looked momentarily stunned; then, yet again, these words—
The fucking blood in the trunk—
swam before him, and he said, "Yeah," trying to sound gruff but missing it by several degrees. "So would I." He busied himself with instant coffee preparations.

Miller said, as Youngman poured water into a shiny aluminum teapot, "Confession's good for the soul, Jack."

Youngman glanced at him from the sink, a look of suspicion, fear, and distrust mingling on his face, making the skin over his cheekbones slither and his mouth open and close repeatedly. He looked back at what he was doing, said, as the water poured, "Yeah, sure it is, Miller; I know it is."

"Confession can make things right, Jack. It can give us peace."

Youngman turned the water off, set the pot on the stove, turned the stove on. "State your business, Miller," he said, this time hitting the gruff tone he was shooting for. "I haven't got all day." He crossed his arms, stood with the small of his back against the top of the stove, aware that in this position his gut hung out quite dramatically. He sucked it in as far as it would go until he could almost see the tips of his shoes.

Miller said, his words slow and measured, "Some of us are . . . tortured, Jack. Some of us are at war with ourselves; we have no . . . no inner peace because there are . . . two entities dwelling within us." He paused for effect. "The animal, and the man."

"Cut the bullshit, Miller!"

Miller went on, clearly ignoring him. "And the animal and the man that are at war within us cannot communicate, because, after all, animals and men communicate on only the most elemental levels. The cat wants food, it meows. But it meows for other reasons, too. It meows when it wants sex, or when it wants to go out. But if the animal dwelling within us is a
wild
animal, if it's beyond all communication, no matter at what level, even with itself—"

"This is a bore, Miller!"

"—Then the two entities, the animal and the man, are kept eternally separate and will never communicate, and so will probably never know anything about each other. Except by the fact of what the animal
does
. Except by the fact that the man
knows
he has some horrible secret eating away at him, gnawing at his guts, but he has no idea what that secret
is
, so his life is made into a kind of living hell—"

The teapot started whistling. Youngman didn't hear it for several seconds, his mind turning over and over what Miller had just said. Then Miller nodded at the teapot, "Jack; it's whistling," and Youngman turned automatically, as if in a daze, toward it.

Miller asked, as Youngman got two mugs from the cupboard, "You know what I'm saying, don't you, Jack?"

Youngman didn't answer.

Miller insisted, "Jack, you
know
what the fuck I'm saying; tell me you know what the fuck I'm saying, Jack."

Still Jack said nothing. He very methodically put a teaspoon of Brim Decaffeinated in each of the two big brown mugs he'd gotten down from the cupboard.

"I'm
talking
to you, Jack. Talk to
me
,
goddamnit
! Unless you want the cops to know what you found in your
friggin
' trunk, Jack!"

Then this went through Youngman's mind:

"You want to play golf with me, Miller, you're going to have to be my little caddy. Is that all right?"

"Sure, Jack—"

"That's `Mr. Youngman,'
damnit
!"

"Uh-huh. Whatever you say."

"Here are my keys. Tote my clubs over to my car and put them in the trunk. Carefully, okay?! If I find one scratch on those clubs—"

Youngman turned to Miller. "You take milk in your coffee?"

"You're not talking to me, Jack. Talk to me. You've gotta talk to me, Jack. You don't talk to me, the cops are gonna be asking you lots of questions, lots of very embarrassing questions."

"I take milk in my coffee. Most people ask, `Do you take cream?' But who the hell puts cream in their coffee anymore?" He poured the hot water into the mugs, turned toward the refrigerator, hesitated, looked back at the mugs and the steam rising lazily from them.

Miller rattled on, "Confession's good for the soul, Jack. Confession can bring us peace, it can fix our tortured inner selves, it can kill the thing that gnaws away at our insides—"

Youngman moved very quickly. He lunged for the mug nearest him, got it, grabbed it, turned. But too late. The mug full of steaming water was easily pushed out of his hand by the inhumanly powerful thing standing with him in his kitchen. He heard the mug clatter to the blue linoleum, heard it shatter dully against the door to the garage. Then he heard the bones surrounding, his larynx being crushed, a sound not unlike ice cracking in a glass. It was the last sound he ever heard.

~ * ~

The man in the Kodak Park Personnel Department recognized Ryerson
Biergarten
from the article that had appeared in the Rochester
Democrat and Chronicle
several weeks earlier. This didn't, however, mean much to him, because the man distrusted "these fortune tellers" and was enjoying the fact that he could give this particular "fortune teller" a hard time.

"Yes, I know who you are," he said.

And Ryerson said, his voice beginning to tighten with anger, "Then you know that I'm working with Rochester Chief of Detectives Tom McCabe—"

"Yes, I know you're working with Chief McCabe on an informal basis. And I'm afraid that that gives you absolutely no power to come in here and demand—"

"I'm not
demanding
a thing. All I'm
asking
is whether you have an employee named Douglas Miller. All I want is a yes or a no. Surely you're capable of that!"

The man, whose name was Mr. Kellogg, smiled thinly. "I'm capable of far more than you might believe, Mr.
Biergarten
. I'm capable, for instance, of calling security—"

"Good," Ryerson broke in. "Please, call security. Call George Dixon. Get him down here; he knows who I am, for God's sake—"

"Mr. Dixon is on a leave of absence."

"Oh." That wasn't good, Ryerson thought. "Oh," he repeated, momentarily at sea.

"Now if you had a warrant, if you had some legal authority—"

Ryerson nodded toward a corridor that led to the interior of The Park. "Is Emulsion Technology down there?" He was acting on a hunch.

Kellogg, speaking too quickly, answered, "Yes, but I'm afraid—"

And Ryerson began loping down that corridor, hoping for signs to show him the way to Emulsion Technology. Where Greta Lynch worked. And where Douglas Miller probably worked as well; all he needed was confirmation of it. A nameplate on a desk, a nod of the head from the manager there.

Ryerson heard Kellogg yell from behind him, "That's a restricted area. Please, come back; I'll have to call security on this—"

~ * ~

George Dixon was writing a letter to his teen-age daughter, Althea, who lived with her mother, Dixon's estranged wife, Martha, in
Boxworth
, California. The letter was in the nature of a confession, although Dixon was having a hell of a time with it. Words had never come easily to him, and these words especially did not flow from the pen onto the paper; instead he had to all but etch them there.

My Dear Althea
, he wrote, thought briefly that he was being a little too sloppily sentimental with that "My Dear" stuff, and continued,
Your Dad isn't a bad man, your Dad is sick, he's a sick man
. He reread the sentence, thought it sounded fine, that it was a good start, and continued writing.

Your Dad
—He stopped, wondered if "Your" should be "You're," because, after all, he didn't want Althea thinking he was
too
damned ignorant. He said "Your" to himself a couple of times, decided that the first way was correct, continued writing;
is someone who got the short end of the stick not that he could help it or had any say either way, this way or that
--

The doorbell to his apartment rang; he snapped his head toward the door and called, voice quaking slightly because he'd been taken by surprise, "Who is it?"

"Douglas Miller," he heard through the closed door.

"I don't know any 'Douglas Miller,' "Dixon called back.

"I work in Emulsion Technology, Mr. Dixon, and I have some information about The Park Werewolf. I know about your desk drawer; I know what was in your desk drawer, Mr. Dixon."

Dixon breathed, "Oh, Jesus!" He shouted back, "Wait there!" He got up and moved quickly to the door, head spinning. "Wait there, please, I'm coming," he called urgently. Then he got to the door, pulled it open, began, "How the hell—" and stopped. His mouth dropped open.

The only other time Dixon had seen a man so blood-soaked was when he'd been working in construction, just before joining the Buffalo Police Department, and a young trainee had fallen twelve stories off a new high-rise head first onto concrete.

"Confession's good for the soul," Doug Miller began.

~ * ~

"Who are you?" Ryerson
Biergarten
pleaded of Roger
Crimm
, whom he found going through a file of papers in Emulsion Technology.

"Who am
I
?"
Crimm
shot back. "Who the hell are
you
?!"

"My name's
Biergarten
. I'm working with Tom McCabe—please, do you work here? Does a man named Miller work here?"
Biergarten
felt a strong hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. "Just a ‘yes' or a 'no,' please."

Crimm
nodded, was about to say "Yes."

Behind Ryerson a security guard barked, "Come with me, sir."

Ryerson asked, "Where does he live? Does he live in the city?"

"Sir!" said the security guard, and again put his hand on Ryerson's shoulder. "You are not allowed here, sir, without a pass—"

"Yes," said
Crimm
.

"Thanks," said Ryerson, and allowed the security guard to take him back to the Personnel Department and Mr. Kellogg, who, wearing a big gloating grin, said, "We all must live by rules, sir. No matter
who
we are," which is when Ryerson at last saw the
Ansel
Adams mural–transparency over the archway leading into the plant.

Kellogg was behind a waist-high counter. There were several pens, fastened to it by long, thin chains, a large glass ashtray, which Kellogg was using, and a clipboard with a blank employment application clipped to it.

Ryerson grabbed the ashtray, hesitated, glanced at Kellogg, who seemed to realize what Ryerson was going to do and also that there was no way to stop him, so his only response was an incredulous shake of the head as Ryerson threw the ashtray forcefully through the mural—transparency, leaving behind a three-foot-long, but very neat, tear in the film. It wasn't enough, Ryerson knew. The picture was still whole. He grabbed the clipboard; Kellogg grabbed his hand; he wrenched free of Kellogg's not-terribly-strong grip and threw the clipboard into the mural—transparency. Another rip appeared, more ragged, at a right angle to the first. It would have to be enough, Ryerson thought.