Unassigned Territory (42 page)

H
arlan was looking at his cast. He could hardly help it, what with the way the thing was, sticking out in front of him, supported by a stick, which in turn was fastened to a belt he wore around his waist. It was a ridiculous arrangement. Looking at it made him think of things he no longer wanted to think about.

He found that the authorities had done a thorough job of checking him out. There had even been a phone call to New York, which in turn had generated a return call from Jim Mitchell. Mitchell had wanted to know if Harlan was in need of legal help. Harlan had said no, that he didn’t think so. He wasn’t being charged with anything. They just wanted to ask him questions. It was embarrassing, was all. Mitchell had advised him to “hang in there.” And so he was. He was hoping today would be the end of it He looked up when Obadiah and the captain came through the door. He had not seen the boy since leaving the hospital. The boy was on crutches, his ankle wrapped up in a thick Ace bandage with a silver clip on it. He watched as Obadiah hobbled over to a metal folding chair near his own and sat down. Beyond the narrow rectangular windows which sat high along one wall Harlan could see patches of blue sky. The windowsills were colored by a golden morning light.

A third man came into the room before they could begin. Harlan had not seen him before. He was a tall, thin man, with a receding hairline. He was dressed rather nattily, in a pale gray suit, a white shirt, and dark red tie. He took a seat near the windows. He did not speak to anyone and the captain did not introduce him. Harlan looked at the man now and then as they talked. He seemed to spend a good deal of time looking at the ceiling. Every now and then he would take a small blue notepad from his breast pocket and jot something down.

They went over it all again. They started at the beginning, the captain asking questions, sometimes of one of them, sometimes of both. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. One of the points he wanted to be sure about was that Obadiah had acted independently when he and Delandra took the Thing. He seemed rather hung up on the idea that if the Table Mountain People, Bill and Judy, perhaps the Sons of Elijah, were all so interested in the Thing, then why not Harlan and his people as well.

It was ground Harlan had already been over numerous times. He went over it again, trying to present in some coherent fashion what it was his people did believe, that their interest in alien beings was slight at best. Part of the problem, however, was that Harlan and Obadiah had not done themselves any favors in this regard early on. There had even been a point, getting from the chopper to the hospital, at which Harlan had actually begun to talk about the hand. It had seemed so plain at the bottom of the hole. Outside the hole it had sounded so ridiculous that he had simply stopped talking. But the damage had been done—between the stuff about the hand and Obadiah’s scene over the stick.

The captain listened to Harlan’s explanation one more time. He nodded in appropriate places. He was a big man with a long, horsey face. The face was tanned and creased with the creases running vertically at the sides of his nose and mouth, and then horizontally across his forehead. He had a way of nodding his head when you told him something which made it appear he was listening to the explanation of some rash act on the part of a small child.

“Your only interest,” the captain said, “was in going after this young man.”

Harlan said that this was right.

The man looked at Obadiah as if this concept—given the young man in question—was particularly offensive, or difficult to comprehend.

“We wanted to talk to him,” Harlan said. “We had reason to believe he might have been in some danger.”

“Ah yes, from Bill Richards and Judy Verity. Something about a Nazi cult, wasn’t it?” He had by now heard everyone’s story several times. He behaved, however, as though he found repeating any of it quite painful. “And Mr. Wheeler was worried about the Indian.” When Obadiah had first mentioned the bondsman from Victorville the captain had nodded, saying that yes, he knew Sam Corasco. He had left it at that. For Obadiah it had been enough. When the captain spoke again he was looking for the first time that morning at the man in the gray suit. “Lots of dangerous people out there,” he said. The man gave him a little smile. The captain went on to enumerate those dangers he considered real as opposed to imaginary. It was not the first time he had done so. He seemed fond, however, of repeating it. He liked to count—using his thumb, checking off against the other fingers: lack of proper clothing, lack of water, no equipment, failure to notify Rangers, etc., etc. It was a lengthy list.

Harlan listened with growing impatience. The man had a point but he was not being altogether fair about it. There were, in fact, some dangerous people out there and the man knew it as well as Harlan. If there weren’t, the captain’s co-workers would not be out there just now, still hunting down body parts. Nor would, he suspected, this stranger with the expensive suit and high, pale brow, be here listening to them, writing things down in his little pad.

He thought of saying something to this effect. What he said instead, however, was something else. “Our only intention,” he said, “in coming here in the first place, was to talk to people about matters that concern us, that we believe should concern all people.” He felt called upon to say something like this, though his heart was not really in it. His shoulder hurt. So did his head. Still, old habits were hard to break and he did not enjoy being made a fool of, even when he had acted like one.

The captain nodded once more. “Only this time you did a little more than talk. You beat up a mechanic. You nearly got yourselves killed, and four people have turned up dead since your boy and his girlfriend began trying to sell her daddy’s monster.”

Obadiah was aware of an acute sinking sensation. To the best of his knowledge there had been three deaths. “Who was the fourth?” he asked.

The captain looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at Harlan Low. “The fourth,” he said, “was Bill Richards. A pair of locals whose jeep your girlfriend stole found his head on the side of a road out there near the Table Mountain Mines.” He paused a minute, looking at each of them once more, then went on. “We have a pretty good idea about who did it,” he said. “It was a messy job. There was blood. A lot of prints.”

When no one said anything the captain got up and crossed the room. He stood next to the wall, looking up toward one of the thin patches of blue. He was carrying a manila folder with him and he tapped his thigh with it. The tapping was the only sound in the room. “And neither of you know anything concerning the whereabouts of Delandra Hummer.”

Neither of them knew.

The captain tapped once more at his leg. “You know,” he said, “that Miss Hummer has a trial date pending on a possession charge. She is currently free on bail. A stipulation of that bail was that she remain in San Bernardino County. We are not in San Bernardino County. If she was here I would have to put her under arrest.” He waited for a moment then stepped away from the window. He shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I remember her old man. I stopped at that damn place of his once, the Desert Museum. Had my boy with me. We were on our way back from Victorville with this new trailer I’d bought down there. The kid wanted to see the Mystery of the Mojave. We stopped and looked at the stupid thing and by the time we got back outside some idiot had pasted a pair of bumper stickers to the rear of that new trailer. I didn’t see the bastards till we got home. When I did, I damn near turned around and went back.”

He looked at the man in the suit for the second time that morning. The man in the suit produced a replica of the smile he had shown earlier. He had his pen and pad both back in his pocket now. He had his legs crossed, the fingers of his hands interlaced about one of his knees. “Tell me,” he said. He was speaking to the captain. His voice was soft and evenly modulated. “Which one of them blew up the car?”

The golden light at the windows was gone by the time the captain said it was over. It had been replaced by something which bespoke the heat of midday.

“If we get a trial out of this, one or both of you may be called to testify.” The captain was addressing himself to Obadiah and Harlan. He was standing before them, looking at the material in his folder. “You,” he said, nodding at Harlan, “are free to go.” Closing the folder he turned to Obadiah. “And you,” he said, “can come with me. I’ve got something I want you to look at.”

Obadiah watched Harlan walk slowly from the room. He had been right. They weren’t going to let him go. He took his crutches from the floor and got to his feet. He felt light-headed and a bit dizzy. As he followed the captain from the room he had this terrible idea that what they were going to make him look at was Bill Richards’s head.

The man in the suit went with them. What they made him look at instead was the bogus version of the Thing they had found in the back of Bill Richards’s Land-Rover. It looked like it had looked at the campsite, except that now there were these dark splotches on parts of its fur. They wanted to know if this was what all the fuss had been over. He told them it was over something else and after that they let him go. He went down a long tiled corridor and stepped into a pool of black asphalt and brilliant sunlight.

Still, he had this idea that they were not done with him. He could imagine one cop saying to another: “Put a tail on him.” The way you might see it in a movie.

He used diversionary tactics. He went around the block. He cut through a bar and went down an alley. His breath was coming hard and the crutches hurt his armpits. He looked for a tail but he couldn’t find it. He went to the hotel where he thought he had seen Delandra.

There was a tough-looking Mexican at the door. When Obadiah started past him the guy got in his way. “You staying here?” the man asked.

“I’m looking for someone,” Obadiah told him.

“Three dollars,the man said.

Obadiah was not sure he had heard correctly. “Three dollars?”

“You pay me three dollars, I let you inside.”

For a moment he thought of laughing, but then the guy at the door didn’t look like he thought it was a joke. He looked like a man who wanted three dollars. Obadiah had two dollars and eighty-three cents. He put it into the man’s palm, which was thick and dark and scarred in a way that reminded Obadiah of a well-worn cutting block. The man looked at the money. He looked at Obadiah. His fingers closed around the coin. His thumb came up pointed in the direction of the lobby. Obadiah lurched inside. He almost thanked the man. He went to a counter and asked another tough-looking Mexican if there was a woman registered by the name of Delandra Hummer. The man looked in a book. “No,” he said.

Obadiah could feel his shirt, wet with sweat, clinging to the skin of his back. He could feel the blood in his cheeks. He was aware of the man at the door. The man was watching him. The man behind the counter was pretending to look for something in a drawer. Obadiah began to describe Delandra Hummer. He did his best to keep his voice from shaking. What he had begun to appreciate was that this was only the first in an endless series of just such scenes. It was the kind of scene from which the rest of his life would be constructed.

The man continued to look into the drawer as Obadiah spoke. Once he exchanged glances with the man by the door. Finally he looked at Obadiah. Obadiah had finished talking. He clung to the soiled wood of the counter as if it might save him. The man looked at him for what seemed an unusually long time. At last he reopened the book. ‘There is someone like that,” he said. He paused, as if examining a lengthy list, or as if he was still trying to make up his mind. He pointed at a signature on a yellowed page. “Lucy Silverfish,” he said. “Third floor. End of the hall.”

W
hen Rex had not returned from the mouth of the gorge the man had come looking for him. Rex had a clear shot at him but he hadn’t taken it. His nerve failed. He did not trust himself with the gun. His eyesight was poor and he had not fired one in years. He lifted a rack of horns belonging to the Hum-A-Phone and started with it across the soft dirt of the gorge. The man met him halfway and Rex could see the moonlight on the gun in his hand.

The man had followed Rex back to the truck, holding the gun on him as he loaded the horns into the bed. “This isn’t camping equipment,” the man said. “I want to know what the fuck is going on.”

“This is a musical instrument,” Rex said. “It plays the music of the spheres.” As Rex was laying the horns in the bed he saw beside the wheel well the short-handled shovel his father had used in defeating the Mystery of the Mojave.

“How much more of this thing is there?” the man wanted to know.

“A lot,” Rex replied.

“Shit.” The man leaned into the bed to examine the horns. “The music of the spheres, huh?” He laughed. He was still laughing at the horns when Rex hit him with the shovel.

It seemed to happen in two ways at once, both slowly and quickly. Reaching for the shovel took a long time. It was as if Rex had to push his hand through something a good deal thicker than air to get it done. Reaching it, however, was like flipping a switch. He could remember the reaching part in minute detail. Afterward, the details began to swirl around one another with increasing speed—sand in a whirlwind.

The man had pitched forward, his helmet clattering against the bed of the truck. The handgun had gone off. Rex had pretended to simply be shifting things in the bed, but had drawn the shovel up quickly, gotten both hands on the handle, and hit the guy with the squared-off piece of steel which provided a grip at one end. He’d caught the man just beneath the ear and just back of the jaw. He had hoped to knock him out. The man, however, did not go quietly. The first bullet had made of the window separating the bed from the cab a web of fractured glass. Rex was momentarily stunned by the explosion. He had seen, however, that the man was twisting himself up on the tailgate, trying to position himself for another shot; he had been forced to hit him again. It was not something he took pleasure in. He’d gotten both hands up near the grip this time and he had swung the shovel like an ax. More shots pierced the night. One grazed Rex’s ear. Another took a chunk from his arm up high, near his shoulder. At some point he must have hit a major artery with the shovel because suddenly there was a lot of blood. It hit the roof of the shell with enough force to make a noise. It was not a noise Rex Hummer would soon forget.