Thinner Read online

  'Don't be such a sanctimonious prick,' Hopley said. 'Sit down, for Christ's sake.'

  Billy sat down, aware that his mouth was dry and that there were small muscles in his thighs which were jumping and dancing uncontrollably.

  'Have it the way you like it, Halleck. I'm more like you than you think. I don't give a fart in a high wind for the postmortems, either. You're right ~ I didn't think, I just did it. They weren't the first bunch of drifters I ever busted out of town, and I've done other little cosmetic jobs when some hot-shit townie got involved in a mess. Of course I couldn't do anything if the townie in question made the mess outside the Fairview town limits ... but you'd be surprised how many of our leading lights never learned that you don't shit where you eat.

  'Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised.'

  Hopley uttered a gasping, wheezy laugh that made goose bumps rise on Billy's arms.

  'All part of the service. If nothing had happened, none of us -you, me, Rossington - would even remember those Gypsies ever existed by now.'

  Billy opened his mouth to utter a hot denial, to tell Hopley that he would remember the sick double-thud he'd heard for the rest of his life ... and then he remembered the four days at Mohonk with Heidi, the two of them laughing together, eating like horses, hiking, making love every night and sometimes in the afternoons. How long had that been after it had happened? Two weeks?

  He closed his mouth again.

  'What's happened has happened. I guess the only reason I let you in at all was that it's good to know someone else believes this is happening, no matter how insane it is. Or maybe I just let you in because I'm lonely. And I'm scared, Halleck. Very scared. Extremely scared. Are you scared?'

  'Yes,' Billy said simply.

  'You know what scares me the most? I can live like this for quite a while. That scares me. Mrs Callaghee does my grocery shopping and she comes in twice a week to clean and do the washing. I've got the TV, and I like to read. My investments have done very well over the years, and if I'm moderately frugal, I could probably go on indefinitely. And just how much temptation to spend does a man in my position have, anyway? Am I going to buy a yacht, Halleck? Maybe charter a Lear and fly to Monte Carlo with my honey to watch the Grand Prix race there next month? What do you think? How many parties do you think I'd be welcome at now that my whole face is sliding off?'

  Billy shook his head numbly.

  'So ... I could live here and it would just ... just go on. Like it's going on right now, every day and every night. And that scares me, because it's wrong to go on living like this. Every day I don't commit suicide, every day I just sit here in the dark watching game shows and sitcoms, that old Gypsy fuck is laughing at me.'

  'When ... when did he ... ?'

  'Touch me? Just about five weeks ago, if it matters. I went up to Milford to see my mother and father. I took them out to lunch. I had a few beers before and a few more during the meal and decided to use the men's room before we left. The door was locked. I waited, it opened, and he came out. Old geezer with a rotted nose. He touched my cheek and said something.'

  'What?'

  'I didn't hear it,' Hopley said. 'Just then, someone in the kitchen dropped a whole stack of plates on the floor. But I didn't really have to hear it. All I've got to do is look in the mirror.'

  'You probably don't know if they were camped in Milford.'

  'As a matter of fact, I checked that out with the Milford P. D. the next day,' Hopley said. 'Call it professional curiosity - I recognized the old Gyp; no way you're going to forget a face like that, you know what I mean?'

  'Yes,' Billy said.

  'They had been camped on a farm in East Milford for four days. Same sort of deal as the one they had with that hemorrhoid Arncaster. The cop I talked to said he'd been keeping pretty close tabs on them and that they appeared to have moved on just that morning.'

  'After the old man touched you.'

  'Right.'

  'Do you think he knew you were going to be there? In that particular restaurant?'

  'I never took my folks there before,' Hopley said. 'It was an old place that had just been renovated. Usually we go to a dago place way on the other side of town. It was my mother's idea. She wanted to see what they did to the rugs or the paneling or something. You know how women are.'

  'You didn't answer my question. Do you think he knew you were going to be there?'

  There was a long, considering silence from the slumped shape in the Eames chair. 'Yes,' Hopley said at last. 'Yes, I do. More insanity, Halleck, right? Good thing no one's keeping score, isn't it?'

  'Yes,' Billy said. 'I guess it is.' A peculiar little giggle escaped him. It sounded like a very small shriek.

  'Now, what's this idea of yours, Halleck? I don't sleep much these days, but I usually start tossing and turning right around this time of night.'

  Asked to bring out in words what he had only thought about in the silence of his own mind, Billy found himself feeling absurd - his idea was weak and foolish, not an idea at all, not really, but only a dream.

  'The law firm I work for retains a team of investigators,' he said. 'Barton Detective Services, Inc.'

  'I've heard of them.'

  'They are supposed to be the best in the business. I ... That is to say . . .'

  He felt Hopley's impatience radiating off the man in waves, although Hopley did not move at all. He summoned what dignity he had left, telling himself that he surely knew as much about what was going on as Hopley, that he had every bit as much right to speak; after all, it was happening to him too.

  'I want to find him,' Billy said. 'I want to confront him. I want to tell him what happened., I ... I guess I want to come completely clean. Although I suppose if he could do these things to us, he may know anyway.'

  'Yes,' Hopley said.

  Marginally encouraged, Billy went on: 'But I still want to tell him my side of it. That it was my fault, yes, I should have been able to stop in time - all things being equal, I would have stopped in time. That it was my wife's fault, because of what she was doing to me. That it was Rossington's fault for whitewashing it, and yours for going easy on the investigation and then humping them out of town.'

  Billy swallowed.

  'And then I'll tell him it was her fault, too. Yes. She was jaywalking, Hopley, and so okay, it's not a crime they give you the gas chamber for, but the reason it's against the law is that it can get you killed the way she got killed.'

  'You want to tell him that?'

  'I don't want to, but I'm going to. She came out from between two parked cars, didn't look either way. They teach you better in the third grade.'

  'Somehow I don't think that babe ever got the Officer Friendly treatment in the third grade,' Hopley said. 'Somehow I don't think she ever went to the third grade, you know?'

  'Just the same,' Billy said stubbornly, 'simple common sense -'

  'Halleck, you must be a glutton for punishment,' -the shadow that was Hopley said. 'You're losing weight now - do you want to try for the grand prize? Maybe next time he'll stop up your bowels, or heat your bloodstream up to about a hundred and ten degrees, or -'

  'I'm not just going to sit in Fairview and let it happen!' Billy said fiercely. 'Maybe he can reverse it, Hopley. Did you ever think of that?'

  'I've been reading up on this stuff,' Hopley said. 'I guess I knew what was happening almost from the time the first pimple showed up over one of my eyebrows. Right where the acne attacks Always started when I was in high school - and I used to have some pisser acne attacks back then, let me tell you. So I've been reading up on it. Like I said, I like to read. And I have to tell you, Halleck, that there are hundreds of books on casting spells and curses, but very few on reversing them.'

  'Well, maybe he can't. Maybe not. Probably not, even. But I can still go to him, goddammit. I can stare him in the face and say, "You didn't cut enough pieces out of the pie, old man. You should have cut out a piece for my wife, and one for your wife, and while we're at it, old man, ho
w about a piece for you? Where were you while she was walking into the street without looking where she was going? If she wasn't used to in-town traffic, you must have known it. So where were you? Why weren't you there to take her by the arm and lead her down to the crosswalk on the corner? Why -'

  'Enough,' Hopley said. 'If I was on a jury, you'd convince me, Halleck. But you forgot the most important factor operating here.'

  'What's that?' Billy asked stiffly.

  'Human nature. We may be victims of the supernatural, but what we're really dealing with is human nature. As a police officer - excuse me, former police officer - I couldn't agree more that there's no absolute right and absolute wrong; there's just one gray shading into the next, lighter or darker. But you don't think her husband's going to buy that shit, do you?'

  'I don't know.'

  'I know,' Hopley said. 'I know, Halleck. I can read that guy so well I sometimes think he must be sending me mental radio signals. All his life he's been on the move, busted out of a place as soon as the "good folks" have got all the maryjane or hashish they want, as soon as they've lost all the dimes they want on the wheel of chance. All his life he's heard a bad deal called a dirty gyp. The "good folks" got roots; you got none. This guy, Halleck, he's seen canvas tents burned for a joke back in the thirties and forties, and maybe there were babies and old people that burned up in some of those tents. He's seen his daughters or his friends' daughters attacked, maybe raped, because all those "good folks" know that gypsies fuck like rabbits and a little more won't matter, and even if it does, who gives a fuck. To coin a phrase. He's maybe seen his sons, or his friends' sons, beaten within an inch of their lives ... and why? Because the fathers of the kids who did the beating lost some money on the games of chance. Always the same: you come into town, the "good folks" take what they want, and then you get busted out of town. Sometimes they give you a week on the local pea farm or a month on the local road crew for good measure. And then, Halleck, on top of everything, the final crack of the whip comes. This hotshot lawyer with three chins and bulldog jowls runs your wife down in the street. She's seventy, seventy-five, half-blind, maybe she only steps out too quick because she wants to get back to her place before she wets herself, and old bones break easy, old bones are like glass, and you hang around thinking maybe this once, just this once, there's going to be a little justice ... an instant of justice to make up for a lifetime of crap -'

  'Quit it,' Billy Halleck said hoarsely, 'just quit it, what do you say?' He touched his cheek distractedly, thinking he must be sweating heavily. But it wasn't sweat on his cheek; it was tears.

  'No, you deserve it all,' Hopley said with savage joviality, 'and I'm going to give it to you. I'm not telling you not to go ahead, Halleck - Daniel Webster talked Satan's jury around, so hell, I guess anything's possible. But I think you're still holding on to too many illusions. This guy is mad, Halleck. This guy is furious. For all you know, he may be right off his gourd by now, in which case you'd be better off making your pitch in the Bridgewater Mental Asylum. He's out for revenge, and when you're out for revenge, you're not apt to see how everything is shades of gray. When your wife and kids get killed in a plane crash, you don't want to listen to how circuit A fucked up switch B, and traffic controller C had a touch of bug D and navigator E picked the wrong time to go to shithouse F. You just want to sue the shit out of the airline ... or kill someone with your shotgun. You want a goat, Halleck. You want to hurt someone. And we're getting hurt. Bad for us. Good for him. Maybe I understand the thing a little better than you, Halleck.'

  Slowly, slowly, his hand crept into the narrow circle of light thrown by the Tensor lamp and turned it so that it shone on his face. Halleck dimly heard a gasp and realized it had come from him.

  He heard Hopley saying: How many parties do you think I'd be welcome at now that my whole face is sliding off?

  Hopley's skin was a harsh alien landscape. Malignant red pimples the size of tea saucers grew out of his chin, his neck, his arms, the back of his hands. Smaller eruptions rashed his cheeks and forehead; his nose was a plague zone of blackheads. Yellowish pus oozed and flowed in weird channels between bulging dunes of proud flesh. Blood trickled here and there. Coarse black hairs, beard hairs, grew in crazy helter-skelter tufts, and Halleck's horrified overburdened mind realized that shaving would have become impossible some time ago in the face of such cataclysmic upheavals. And from the center of it all, helplessly embedded in that trickling red landscape, were Hopley's staring eyes.

  They looked at Billy Halleck for what seemed an endless length of time, reading his revulsion and dumbstruck horror. At last he nodded, as if satisfied, and turned the Tensor lamp off.

  'Oh, Christ, Hopley, I'm sorry.'

  'Don't be,' Hopley said, that weird joviality back in his voice. 'Yours is going slower, but you'll get there eventually. My service pistol is in the third drawer of this desk, and if it gets bad enough I'll use it no matter what the balance is in my bankbook. God hates a coward, my father used to say. I wanted you to see me so you'll understand. I know how he feels, that old Gyp. Because I wouldn't make any pretty legal speeches. I wouldn't bother with any sweet reason. I'd kill him for what he's done to me, Halleck.'

  That dreadful shape moved and shifted. Halleck heard Hopley draw his fingers down his cheek, and then he heard the unspeakable, sickening sound of ripe pimples breaking wetly open. Rossington is plating, Hopley's rotting, and I'm wasting away, he thought. Dear God, let it be a dream, even let me be crazy ... but don't let this be happening.

  'I'd kill him very slowly,' Hopley said. 'I will spare you the details.'

  Billy tried to speak. There was nothing but a dry croak.

  'I understand where you're coming from, but I hold out very little hope for your mission,' Hopley said hollowly. 'Why don't you consider killing him instead, Halleck? Why don't you ... ?'

  But Halleck had reached his limit. He fled Hopley's darkened study, cracking his hip hard on the corner of his desk, madly sure that Hopley would reach out with one of those dreadful hands and touch him. Hopley didn't.

  Halleck ran out into the night and stood there breathing great lungfuls of clean air, his head bowed, his thighs trembling.

  Chapter Thirteen

  172

  He thought restlessly for the rest of the week of calling Ginelli at Three Brothers - Ginelli seemed like an answer of some kind -just what kind, he didn't know. But in the end he went ahead and checked into the Glassman Clinic and began the metabolic series. If he had been single and alone, as Hopley was (Hopley had made several guest appearances in Billy's dreams the night before), he would have canceled the whole business. But there was Heidi to think about ... and there was Linda - Linda, who truly was an innocent bystander and who understood none of this. So he checked into the clinic, hiding his crazy knowledge like a man hiding a drug habit.

  It was, after all, a place to be, and while he was there, Kirk Penschley and the Barton Detective Services would be taking care of his business. He hoped.

  So he was poked and prodded. He drank a horrid chalky-tasting barium solution. He was given X rays, a CAT-scan, an EEG, an EKG, and a total metabolic survey. Visiting doctors were brought around to look at him as if he were a rare zoo exhibit. A giant panda, or maybe the last of the dodo birds, Billy thought, sitting in the solarium and holding an unread National Geographic in his hands. There were Band-Aids on the backs of both hands. They had stuck a lot of needles in him.

  On his second morning at Glassman, as he submitted to yet another round of poking and prying and tapping, he noticed that he could see the double stack of his ribs for the first time since ... since high school? No, since forever. His bones were making themselves known, casting shadows against his skin, coming triumphantly out. Not only were the love handles above his hips gone, the blades of his pelvic bones were clearly visible. Touching one of them, he thought that it felt knobby, like the gearshift of the first car he had ever owned, a 1957 Pontiac. He laughed a little, and then felt
the sting of tears. All of his days were like that now. Upsy-downsy, weather unsettled, chance of showers.

  I'd kill him very slowly, he heard Hopley saying. I will spare you the details.

  Why? Billy thought, lying sleepless in his clinic bed with the raised invalid sides. You didn't spare me anything else.

  During his three-day stay at Glassman, Halleck lost seven pounds. Not much, he thought with his own brand of gallows joviality. Not much, less than the weight of a medium-sized bag of sugar. At this rate I won't fade away to nothing until ... gee! Almost October!

  172, his mind chanted. 172 now, if you were a boxer you'd be out of the heavyweight class and into the middleweight ... would you care to try for welterweight, Billy? Lightweight? Bantamweight? How about flyweight?

  Flowers came: from Heidi, from the firm. A small nosegay came from Linda - written on the card in her flat, sprawling hand was Please get well soon, Daddy - Love you, Lin. Billy Halleck cried over that.

  On the third day, dressed again, he met with the three doctors in charge of his case. He felt much less vulnerable in jeans and a MEET ME IN FAIRVIEW T-shirt; it was really amazing how much it meant to be out of one of the goddamn hospital johnnies. He listened to them, thought of Leda Rossington, and suppressed a grim smile.

  They knew exactly what was wrong with him; they were not mystified at all. Au contraire, they were so excited they were damned near making weewee in their pants. Well ... maybe a note of caution was in order. Maybe they didn't know exactly what was wrong with him yet, but it was surely one of two things (or possibly three). One of them was a rare wasting disease that had never been seen outside of Micronesia. One was a rare metabolic disease that had never been completely described. The third - just a possibility, mind you! - was a psychological form of anorexia nervosa, this last so rare that it had long been suspected but never actually proven. Billy could see from the hot light in their eyes that they were pulling for that one; they would get their names in the medical books. But in any case, Billy Halleck was definitely a rara avis, and his doctors were like kids on Christmas morning.